A lack of sleep doesn’t just make you tired–it changes how your brain works while you’re awake.
Authored by George Citroner: Most of us have experienced this: You stayed up a bit too late the night before, and although your body turned up to work, your mind was elsewhere.
Blanking out during the day is common for the sleep-deprived, and now researchers have found out why it happens.
When people experience attention lapses after poor sleep, a wave of cerebrospinal fluid flows out of the brain.
During sleep, cerebrospinal fluid—part of the brain’s cleaning system—flushes away waste products, but sleep deprivation forces this process to activate during waking hours.
“If you don’t sleep, the [cerebrospinal fluid] CSF waves start to intrude into wakefulness where normally you wouldn’t see them,” senior study author Laura Lewis, an associate professor at MIT, said in a press statement. “They come with an attentional tradeoff, where attention fails during the moments that you have this wave of fluid flow.”
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