What Happens To Your Brain When You Pull An All-Nighter
Trending News: Long Hours Are Rotting Your Brain
Why Is This Important?
Because those late nights at the office could be rotting your brain.
Long Story Short
Scientists in Norway have performed a groundbreaking study into sleep deprivation and found that going a night without sleep seems to affect the white matter in the brain.
In a revolutionary study into human sleep deprivation, lead scientist Torbjorn Elvsashagen and his team studied 21 healthy young men as they stayed awake for 23 hours.
Unlike when most of us pull an all-nighter, the participants weren’t allowed alcohol, caffeine or nicotine (what's the fun in that?). At the start of the experiment (7:30 am), participants were given diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) tests. DTI tests measure the movement of water in the brain and are a common way of testing brain function and searching for damage to the white matter.
The results showed ‘significant changes’ to the white matter in the brain after participants had been denied sleep for an entire day. It is suspected that the ill-effects can be reversed by catching up on sleep, but if all-nighters become regular fixtures of your working life, it may take its toll. White matter helps your brain transmit info from one area to another. A lack of sleep can basically slow down your brain.
Study lead Elvsashagen wrote in a blog post: “My hypothesis would be that the putative effects of one night of sleep deprivation are short term and reverse after one to a few nights of normal sleep. However, it could be hypothesized that chronic sleep insufficiency might lead to longer-lasting alterations in brain structure.”
It is worth noting that two participants weren’t so adversely affected, possibly because they were more rested at the start of the test.
This is the first study of its type on humans and is likely to lead to more research on what we can do to remedy the fallout of all-nighters.
Experts are increasingly indicating that common working patterns aren’t conducive to good health and Paul Kelley recently told the British Science Festival that work should start at 10:00 a.m. to allow us to get the sleep we need. Six-hour working days are being introduced in Sweden with mostly positive results. All the evidence points to the fact that we need more to recharge the batteries. The question is, when is boss going to realize this?