A recent study found that sleep is important to maintaining the health of the brain’s nerve cells, as reported by WCVB5 news report.
Getting the proper amount of sleep each night doesn’t just help us operate at peak efficiency the next day — it also nurtures the brain itself.
A recent study by researchers in England published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, found that sleep is important to maintaining the health of our brain’s nerve cells, or neurons, in that it allows them to independently rest and repair themselves. If our neurons attempt to rest while we’re awake, they write, it has a negative effect on our brain performance.
“It’s similar to a complex machine with multiple interactive components,” says Dr. Robert Thomas, a sleep medicine doctor and co-director of the Sleep Disorders Clinic at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “If a machine keeps running and running, over time it will experience wear and tear and ultimately, damage.”
