No Rest For The Sluggish
By Hayley Birch
What’s keeping you awake at night? Creaking doors, dripping taps? Something playing on your mind? Maybe you’re just too damn lazy during the day.
It seems intuitive: the more you use your brain and body during the day, the deeper you’ll sleep come bedtime. This, surely, is the phenomenon that allows students to party past 4am.
But researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have gone out of their way to prove it. Although it has long since been established that waking activity can impact on your “sleep intensity”, nobody, until now, quite knew why.
It turns out to be to do with something called synaptic plasticity. Now that’s not half as scary as it sounds. Imagine a dense ball of tangled wires; each of those wires has potential contacts with thousands of others in the ball. This ball is of course, your brain, and the wires are your nerve cells, or neurons. The interconnections - where the wires touch - are called synapses; “synaptic plasticity” is the changing strength of these connections, how weak or tight the links are.
There are several genes that are known to affect synaptic plasticity, but only one, BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) has so far been identified as having any influence on sleep intensity. BDNF seems to be associated with brain waves of a particular frequency, known as slow wave activity.
The new research shows higher levels of BDNF expression in the brains of dozing rats involved in exploratory activity prior to sleep (as opposed to lazy rats). What this “exploratory activity” is we’re not entirely sure, but I personally like to think that it involves little rat-compasses and rat-flags.
All this leads Chiara Cirelli, one of the team studying the sleepy rodents, to believe that BDNF and synaptic plasticity are instrumental in telling the brain how much it needs to rest (after all that conquering of new lands): "This paper offers a first hint of what may be at least one of the crucial factors linking the 'quality' of wakefulness to the intensity of sleep.”
Hayley writes some really great stuff. Read her articles here.
It seems intuitive: the more you use your brain and body during the day, the deeper you’ll sleep come bedtime. This, surely, is the phenomenon that allows students to party past 4am.
But researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have gone out of their way to prove it. Although it has long since been established that waking activity can impact on your “sleep intensity”, nobody, until now, quite knew why.
It turns out to be to do with something called synaptic plasticity. Now that’s not half as scary as it sounds. Imagine a dense ball of tangled wires; each of those wires has potential contacts with thousands of others in the ball. This ball is of course, your brain, and the wires are your nerve cells, or neurons. The interconnections - where the wires touch - are called synapses; “synaptic plasticity” is the changing strength of these connections, how weak or tight the links are.
There are several genes that are known to affect synaptic plasticity, but only one, BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) has so far been identified as having any influence on sleep intensity. BDNF seems to be associated with brain waves of a particular frequency, known as slow wave activity.
The new research shows higher levels of BDNF expression in the brains of dozing rats involved in exploratory activity prior to sleep (as opposed to lazy rats). What this “exploratory activity” is we’re not entirely sure, but I personally like to think that it involves little rat-compasses and rat-flags.
All this leads Chiara Cirelli, one of the team studying the sleepy rodents, to believe that BDNF and synaptic plasticity are instrumental in telling the brain how much it needs to rest (after all that conquering of new lands): "This paper offers a first hint of what may be at least one of the crucial factors linking the 'quality' of wakefulness to the intensity of sleep.”
Hayley writes some really great stuff. Read her articles here.
Image: Susan H.
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