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Sleep may not be the on-or-off state it’s generally considered to be.

Research from the UW-Madison Department of Psychiatry published in the latest issue of Nature suggests that portions of brains can fall asleep even as the person – or mouse – remains awake.

The study implanted sensors in the brains of mice to measure neuron activity. The researchers found that mice kept awake for long periods of time began to display brain waves associated with deep sleep in parts of their brains, indicating that sections had temporarily shut down and entered a sleep state even as the mouse remained awake.

The longer mice were kept awake, the more patches of their brain shut down.

The distribution of these “sleepy” patches appeared to be random. UW-Madison neuroscientist Guilio Tononi offered this description to Nature: “If we could watch the whole brain, it would be like watching boiling water. When you are awake, just before boiling, all the neurons are on. As the animal gets tired, the off periods would then be the bubbles. Where they appear is impossible to predict.”

Sleep-deprived mice with less neuron activity performed worse on a skill test (grabbing a sugar pellet through a hole), suggesting these partial brain shutdowns are responsible for the lapses in brain function and judgment associated with sleep deprivation in both animals and humans.

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