New Study Reveals What Happens to Your Brain When You Ski...

What’s Happening

Listen up: It might go into “clean-up mode” right as you’re trying to focus on that presentation.

When study participants took an attention test while sleep-deprive d, their brain scans showed signs of a sleep-like state linked to the brain’s nightly cleaning process. This could be the brain’s attempt to make up for missed sleep. (plot twist fr)

Skimping on sleep—and robbing your brain of time in “clean-up mode”—can have short- and long-term health consequences.

The Details

You’re not yourself when you don’t get enough sleep , making it hard to stay focused on just about anything. But the next time you notice yourself zoning out when you’re wiped, consider this: It may be your brain’s way of making time to clean itself.

That’s the main message from a recent study published in Nature Neuroscience. For the relatively small study, researchers compared people’s brain scans from when they got a good night’s sleep to when they were sleep-deprived , and noticed some intriguing differences.

Why This Matters

We tapped a sleep medicine physician and neurologist for more. Christopher Winter, MD, is a neurologist and sleep medicine physician with Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Medicine and host of the Sleep Unplugged podcast. Clifford Segil, DO , is a neurologist at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, CA.

Medical professionals are taking note of this development.

Key Takeaways

• Researchers recruited 26 people and scanned their brains after they had a good night’s sleep and again when they were sleep-deprived.
• While in the MRI, they also had the participants do a couple of tasks designed to check their focus.
• People did poorly on the attention tests when they were sleep deprived compared to when they were well-rested—no shocker there.

The Bottom Line

But here’s where things get interesting: Attention “failures” corresponded with an increased flow of cerebrospinal fluid—which surrounds and cushions the brain—out of their brains. This is a process that typically happens during sleep, and the researchers suggest that this may be the brain’s attempt to compensate for missed rest.

We want to hear your thoughts on this.