What Happens When Your Brain Doesn’t Sleep

Brain Doesn't SleepDiscover The Negative Effects

Our brain is a very complex organ in our bodies and when our brain doesn’t sleep is when we begin to see the the serious side effects. The lack of sleep we experience more often, the more often we put ourselves at risk for serious health risks. It can affect our moods, and just overall our daily lives! The importance of making sure our brains get adequate amounts of rest can really benefit us, which you might realize it until you actually do it! Keep reading on to find out what happens to your brain when you don’t get enough sleep!

Your brain is an organ of soft nervous tissue contained in skull of vertebrates, functioning as the coordinating center of sensation and intellectual and nervous activity. Your brain contains four separate lobes: the parietal, temporal, occipital and frontal lobes. The brain is said to to be the source of all the qualities that define our humanity. It functions every part of our body. If our brain doesn’t sleep, it can affect the way the rest of the brain works. This is why its extremely important to eat appropriately and make sure we get enough sleep, so that we can function like a normal human being!

What Happens When Your Brain Doesn’t Sleep?

When our brain doesn’t sleep this is what happens to our brains, as devised by the Journal of Neuroscience and the Berkeley Walker Sleep Lab.

  • Lost memories – The hippocampus, a moon shaped structure in our brain, specifically the temporal lobe exhibits a distinct pattern of neural activeing when the waking mind encodes new information. It is said that the brain later replays the same activity pattern while we’re sleeping to help the info stick. If you lose out on sleep, you lose out on long term memories.
  • Anger – Sleep loss primes us to focus on negative experiences, misinterpret facial expressions and pick fights. Emotional volatility may partly be a product of interrupted communication between brain regions.
  • Impaired Wit – Sleep loss affects cognitive processes like divergent thinking, which helps use switch topics nimbly during conversation. It has been found that activity in the inferior frontal gyrus increases when sleep deprived people tried to list uses for different objects, suggestion the brain draws on divergent thinking to compensate for strained cognitive thinking.
  • Hallucinations – When the brain can’t filter the information coming in, chaos ensues. After pulling an all night, people may begin to anticipate tings that aren’t there.
  • Head In The Clouds – Typically, after a good nights sleep the attention lapses that correlate with sleep correspond to altered thalamus function and less active frontal and parietal networks, which basically means we tune out when we’re bored.
  • False Memories – A sleep starved brain may fail to encode memories successfully in the first place, thanks to the altered function in the hippocampus, as well as, prefrontal cortex and parietal lobe regions.
  • Cerebral Shrinkage – Healthy adults getting poor sleep lose volume in the frontal, temporal and parietal lobes, which was shown by one study.
  • Slurred Speech – The temporal lobe, the brain region associated with language processing, is highly active in well rested people but inactive in their exhausted and enunciation challenged counterparts.
  • Food Binges – Sleep also corresponds with decreased activity in the frontal lobe, which controls decision making, and more activity in the amygdala. Together, these neural changes create a brain mechanism that dulls judgement and ratchets up desire.
  • Risky Decisions – Sleep deprived people prepare to make economic decisions, the brain’s reward center in the prefrontal cortex lights up, suggesting they expect to win. But when those risky choices don’t pan out, people’s brain activity decreases in the region related to punishment and aversion, suggesting they don’t care about losing money as much as they would on a good nights sleep.
  • Brain Damage – Pulling all nighters can kill brain cells. The damage may be irreparable, making “catching up on lost sleep” a poor excuse for snoozing till noon on the weekends.