How Does Poor Sleep Affect Our Ability to Learn? Study Investigates

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-Anna Sandolu

www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles

Researchers found that the brain area is responsible for everything what happen to us including new skills, movement, sleep quality, etc. The motor cortex is not only responsibility for developing and controlling motor skills, but also helps the brain to restore itself after a day of activity by the deep sleep phase (Slow Wave Sleep). Now a new study manages to find precisely the brain area in the motor cortex responsible for learning new skills and shows how it can be affected by poor sleep quality.

Then Researchers do manipulating the motor cortex during deep sleep to six women and seven men to see how poor sleep can affect our ability to learn, after that they are asked to their willingness for helping researcher to find out How Does Poor Sleep Affect Our Ability to Learn? By using an electroencephalogram, the participants are monitored their brain while they were sleeping. During at night, their deep sleep had been disturbed. They did not know that their deep sleep had been disturbed.

On the first night of experiment, they were able to sleep without disturbance.

On the second night, the researchers were able to manipulated the participants' sleep quality and began to focus on the motor cortex. Through the experiment, researchers found the impact that poor sleep has on the neuroplasticity involved in practicing new movements.

The participants just felt that their quality sleep did not same as on both occasions. The researchers evaluated the participants' ability to learn new movements, and at then first day they did well. However, as the day progress their learning efficiency, after their sleep manipulated, did not improve as significantly. They do many mistakes and their performance was as low as on the evening of the previous day. The reason why it happens, according from researcher, is that during the manipulated deep sleep, then neurons' synapses did not "rest" as they normally would during restorative sleep. Poor sleep keeps synapses excited blocks the brain's ability to learn.

To ensure that they located the right brain area responsible for deep sleep, the researchers repeated the experiment by assigning the same task but manipulating a different region of the brain, but it did not result any chance to the participants' performance.

Sleeping 10 hours is better than sleep 8 hours because our body needs rest as well. Don't forget to take a rest and sleep well.

by Dini Dwintika Karuniati
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