Jewish News Service reports that a new collaborative study conducted by Israeli and American researchers has uncovered how being sleep-deprived negatively affects brain activity.
“When we’re sleep-deprived, a local intrusion of sleep-like waves disrupts normal brain activity while we’re performing tasks,” said Yuval Nir, of TAU’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine and Sagol School of Neuroscience, who directed the study.
Throughout the study, researchers logged the brain activity of 12 epilepsy patients who had previously shown little or no response to drug interventions at UCLA.
In order to record neural activity, the patients were hospitalized for a week and had electrodes implanted to identify the area of the brain where seizures originate. The patients were kept awake for a whole night in order to accelerate the investigation.
