Are You Sleep Deprived? You May Find It Hard to Remember Things

Every person spends one third of his or her life sleeping. Sleep, which is a daily function, is not simply a resting period for all systems of the body going into a passive state. This is the time when the body enters into an active renewal process. Now let's see how the human body renews itself in sleep. Sleep is among the critical necessities of human life. Our body needs sleep as much as it needs water, oxygen and food. A refreshing sleep is of vital importance in order to maintain a balanced life. Sleep is not a state of passive resting. During sleep, activities that occupy one's mind such as stress is cleaned out as if formatting computer memory. Hormone levels are stabilised, the digestive system improved, the immune system rebooted and the skin reconfigured during sleep. Cell division continues intensively in sleep. But if you are struggling to get a good night's sleep, then you could be in trouble.

A new study has found that if you don't get enough sleep, you might just start forgetting things. Sleep deprivation can interfere with the process that helps reinforce our memories. The researchers at Johns Hopkins University, US have fortified evidence that a key purpose of sleep is to re-calibrate the brain cells responsible for learning and memory so that we can 'solidify' lessons learned and use them when awaken. They conducted the research on mice to study the correlation between sleep and memory.The researchers also report they have discovered several important molecules that govern the re-calibration process, as well as evidence that sleep deprivation, sleep disorders and sleeping pills can interfere with the process. "Our findings solidly advance the idea that the mouse and presumably the human brain can only store so much information before it needs to re-calibrate," said Graham Diering from Johns Hopkins University.

"Without sleep and the re-calibration that goes on during sleep, memories are in danger of being lost," said Diering. Diering said that current scientific understanding of learning suggests that information is "contained" in synapses, the connections among neurons through which they communicate. On the "sending side" of a synapse, signaling molecules called neurotransmitters are released by a brain cell as it "fires"; on the "receiving side," those molecules are captured by receptor proteins, which pass the "message" along. If a cell receives enough input through its synapses, it fires off its own neurotransmitters. More specifically, experiments in animals have shown that the synapses on the receiving neuron can be toggled by adding or removing receptor proteins, thereby strengthening or weakening them and allowing the receiving neuron to receive more or less input from nearby signaling neurons.When neurons are "maxed out" and constantly firing, they lose their capacity to convey information, stymieing learning and memory. One possible reason that neurons do not usually max out is a process that has been well-studied in lab-grown neurons but not in living animals, asleep or awake. Known as homeostatic scaling down, it is a process that uniformly weakens synapses in a neural network by a small percentage, leaving their relative strengths intact and allowing learning and memory formation to continue.

To find out if the process does occur in sleeping mammals, Diering focused on the areas of the mouse brain responsible for learning and memory: the hippocampus and the cortex. He purified proteins from receiving synapses in sleeping and awake mice, looking for the same changes seen in lab-grown cells during scaling down. Results showed a 20% drop in receptor protein levels in sleeping mice, indicating an overall weakening of their synapses, compared to mice that were awake.

This new study has added one more point to the already long list of benefits of sleep in our life. So in order to prevent brain related problems one must take adequate amount of sleep in a day.