Your brain tracks your sleep debt – and now we may know how

Researchers have discovered neurons in mice that help their brains to track and recover from Sleep debts. If there is a similar path in humans, it may improve the treatments of sleep disorders and other conditions that are weak, such as Alzheimer’s disease.

We are all familiar with sleep debts, or the gap between How much sleep you need How much do you really get. But so far, it was not clear how the brain tracked sleep loss – or is forced to compensate for this difference.

Mark Woo At Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and his colleagues, his colleagues set the brain paths in mice that are involved in sleeping by injection tracked in 11 brain -known strokes. The tracking, which travels from the neurons that receive references to those who send them, has revealed 22 areas with contacts of at least four areas of sleep enhancement.

The researchers focused on a sub -group of 11 unlimited areas. Using a technique called chemical planet science, gave specialized drug mice that stimulate certain parts of their brains. They divided the mice into 11 groups of three to four individuals, and activated a different area in each group.

It seems that an area called the murderer of the Mahdia is the key. When neurons were stimulated in this region, mice witnessed the largest increase in non-kinetic eye movement (REM)-about twice the amount of mice that were not stimulated. However, it took several hours until the animals fall asleep after motivation, which seemed to be preparing to rest.

“When you go to bed, you likely clean your teeth with a brush, wash your face, flourish your pillow or arrange your blankets and then go to sleep.” Mice do something similar. He says: “They are returning their face, cleaning their hairs, and then they flourish their nest.” This indicates that these neurons are not a continuous key to sleep-instead, they stimulate drowsiness.

Any other test support for this idea. In six mice deprived of sleep, the abolition of activating the mihadist brain cells made the rodents lower sleepy They were more active and spent less time than nesting than mice control. They also got 10 percent less sleep, on average.

Other experiments have shown that these neurons are active during sleep deprivation and calm once sleep begins.

Wu says: The results indicate that this brain area pushes drowsiness and leads to sleep after losing sleep. The development of treatments targeting these neurons can lead to new treatments for hyperplasia – sleep disorder that has excessive sleepiness after rest – as well as cases such as Alzheimer’s disease, where people do not sleep enough.

However, it is not clear whether the circle of the brain itself is present in humans, he says William Giardino At Stanford University, California. We also don’t know if he plays a role in long -term deprivation. “They focus more on the short -term effects of sleep deprivation, which may not closely design humans with years, years and years of nights without sleep.”