BrainWorks: Sleep & the Nervous System
How Sleep Affects Our Bodies
Olivia, Emmy, Brian and Haajirah
BrainWorks: The Nervous System
Is Sleep Important?
Sleep is very important to every living creature especially humans and some people believe that while your sleep your brain is just inactive but this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Your brain does a lot when your sleeping for example you have slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement, which is when you dream. Sleep also helps you better recall events earlier in the day.
“Sleeping is an integral part of our life, and as research shows, it is incredibly complex. The brain generates two distinct types of sleep—slow-wave sleep (SWS), known as deep sleep, and rapid eye movement (REM), also called dreaming sleep. Most of the sleeping we do is of the SWS variety, characterized by large, slow brain waves, relaxed muscles and slow, deep breathing, which may help the brain and body to recuperate after a long day.”
How do our Nervous Systems Work?
The Role it Plays When We Sleep
The nervous system is divided into two main parts: the central nervous system, and the peripheral nervous system. The central nervous system is made up of the brain and the spinal cord while the peripheral nervous system is made up of the nerves that travel throughout the body’s skin, joints, and muscles. Sleep is something that majorly affects the nervous system. On its most basic level, sleeping assists in helping us regain strength and energy. However, it also assists us in remembering things. Before you remember the experiences you go through in your everyday life, they first need to be processed and stored. When you first experience something, that information is only short-term memory. As you sleep, your body goes through a process known as consolidation. This is a process where, as you sleep, bits and pieces of this information are transferred from your short-term memory to your long-term memory. This is why younger people need more sleep than adults. Younger people are learn more language, social, and motor skills than adults do. So, staying up late and waking up early prevents you from remembering things in the long run, especially for younger people.
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How do Our Nervous Systems Work? (contd.)
Sleep also plays a huge factor in your emotional well-being. A study was done where psychologists tested a group of college students’ positive emotional responses to s series of positive and negative pictures. They found that, as the students get more and more tired, they tend to respond to the pictures more negatively, even when the pictures were happy and uplifting. The co-author of the study, psychologist June J. Pilcher, stated that “‘The human brain is naturally more attentive to negative events,’ perhaps as a survival mechanism that keeps us on the alert for life-threatening situations.” This could be very true. In fact, studies have shown that, when you are introduced to a scary/life-threatening situation, a part of your diencephalon (the part of your brain that controls your instinctive behavior) will take control and your cerebrum (the part of your brain that controls thinking) will shut down. This could be a similar thing when you get tired. You become easily aggravated and “crabby” because you aren’t thinking as much.
Effects of Sleep
The nervous system is made up of the brain,spine,nerves, ganglia and our digestive tract.As humans, our bodies cannot fully function without sleep. When we disrupt our sleeping habits, it can result in memory loss, mood changes, trouble thinking and concentrating, weakened immune system, loss of balance and having a low sex drive. During sleep, the temporal lobe of our brain makes connections so that we are able to remember things. Lack of sleep can impact both short term and long term memory. Sleep deprivation can also affect your mood which is controlled by the hypothalamus . You may become very moody or emotional. This can also lead to depression and anxiety which can worsen overtime. The frontal lobe is what helps us problem solve. When we have trouble with sleeping, our concentration is affected and we cannot create ideas and problem solve as well as we could have if our sleeping was normal. The hypothalamus also is involved with our sexual interactions. The less sleep you get, the less of a sex drive you will have. Having a weak immune system can come from many thing, but it doesn’t help if you aren’t getting enough sleep. The nerves in your body won't be as strong to send signals that will help your cells fight off infections and viruses at their best strength
BrainWorks: The Nervous System Services
Homeostasis refers to body temperature, pH levels of bodily fluids, weight, and sleep propensity and other body characteristics.
Sleep propensity – the pressure to sleep – especially when we have been up for a long period of time. When sleep intensity is high, sleep tends to be less fragmented with fewer nighttime awakenings.
Regulation
Homeostasis refers to regulatory mechanisms that maintain the constancy of the physiology of organisms.
Two Main Regulated:
sleep intensity and
to a lesser extent, sleep duration (or the amount of sleep)
Depression
Sleep in depressed patients show the following changes: prolonged sleep latency, a shallow fragmented sleep process and precocious awakening in the morning. Slow wave sleep is reduced.
Sleep deprivation for one night exerts an immediate antidepressant effect that is short lived. It was hypothesized that sleep regulation (Process S) is deficient in depression. The antidepressant effect of sleep deprivation was attributed to the increased level of Process S by lengthening wakefulness.
Children
The increase of homeostatic sleep pressure during wakefulness is faster in early pubertal children compared to mature adolescents.
Quotes
“These chemical signals travel through the circulatory system to organ systems such as the digestive and muscular systems. They also control processes that maintain homeostasis. ... The endocrine, nervous, and muscular systems work together and maintain temperature homeostasis.”
“Sleep homeostasis denotes a basic principle of sleep regulation. A sleep deficit elicits a compensatory increase in the intensity and duration of sleep, while excessive sleep reduces sleep propensity. Slow waves in the electroencephalogram (EEG), a correlate of sleep intensity, serve as an indicator of sleep homeostasis in nonREM sleep.”
Details
You also need the correct neurons/hormones to be transferred to and fro from the central nervous system to the peripheral nervous system. Sleep deprivation “compromises the faithful signaling of… viscerosensory brain and peripheral autonomic body processing of complex social signals.” Moreover, the neurons/hormones responsible for our emotional interpretation of life are not getting to the proper places/aren’t at the proper levels.
Sleep/sleep deprivation affects the following bodily hormones: growth hormone, melatonin, cortisol, cortisol, leptin, and ghrelin levels. In simple terms, sleep deprivation disrupts your internal clock (circadian rhythm). Your growth hormone level increases during sleep, allowing you to grow more. Therefore, sleep deprivation can prevent your body from growing properly. While living on Earth, your internal clock adjusts to the cycle of night and day. When your body senses that it is night time, it releases melatonin, which causes you to feel tired and regulated your sleep. However, sleep deprivation can confuse your brain because it loses track of when the pineal gland should release the hormone, causing you to feel tired throughout random times in the day. Cortisol is also very important; it helps control blood sugar levels, regulate metabolism, help reduce inflammation, and assists in memory formulation. Cortisol levels rapidly increase in the middle of the night. Meaning, if you aren’t sleeping effectively and/or have disrupted your internal clock, cortisol won’t be released and will very negatively affect your body. Finally, leptin and ghrelin are hormones that regulate appetite and fat storage. The disruption of this can assist in the development of obesity.
Professions in Sleep
Sleep Physcology is the study of sleep which includes evaluation and treatments of sleep disorders.It addresses behavioral, psychological and physiological factors that underlie normal and disordered sleeping habits throughout the human life. It develops, tests psychological ways to the prevent and treat of sleep disorders and related conditions. The problems that are addressed in sleep physcology are sleep disorders, insomnias, hypersomnia, including narcolepsy, sleep‐related breathing disorders, sleep cycle Disorders, parasomnias (e.g., nightmares, bedwetting, sleep walking, sleep terrors, etc.), and sleep‐related movement disorders (e.g., periodic limb movement disorder, teeth grinding, etc.). Sleep Psychologists use Polysomnography, which is a fancy word for sleep study, to test and analyze sleep related disorders. Polysomnography is a set of tests that record waves in your brain,the oxygen level in your blood, heart rate and breathing, as well as eye and leg movements during the study. These tests are done in a hospital or at a sleep therapy institution.
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Medication Used for Sleep
There are three classes of medications that are notorious for causing cognitive side effects. One is benzodiazepines and includes Valium and Xanax. These are prescribed to treat anxiety and sometimes sleep. Drugs in this class are generally not recommended for long-term use as a sleep aid. They can impair memory and require higher doses over time to achieve the same effect. The other class of medications is narcotic analgesics. These are getting a lot of attention, like hydrocodone or oxycodone since they are very addictive.
Lastly, another drug class people don’t realize may undermine brain health is antihistamines. They are commonly used to treat allergies and usually are generally safe.
Older people can get confused when taking diphenhydramine. This is because it also blocks a brain chemical called acetylcholine. This can play a big role in attention and short-term memory. Taking diphenhydramine over a long period of time can predispose people to dementia.