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Representative Image

What happens to your brain when you sleep

ANI | Updated: Nov 01, 2019 17:06 IST

Washington D.C. [USA], Nov 1 (ANI): A recent study suggests that amazing things happen with a person's brain while sleeping.
The neurons will go quiet and a few seconds later, blood flows out of the head. Then, a watery liquid called cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) flows in, washing through the brain in rhythmic, pulsing waves.
The study - published in Science - is the first to illustrate that the brain's CSF pulses during sleep, and that these motions are closely tied with brain wave activity and blood flow.
"We've known for a while that there are these electrical waves of activity in the neurons," said study co-author Laura Lewis, a BU College of Engineering assistant professor of biomedical engineering and a Center for Systems Neuroscience faculty member.
"But before now, we didn't realise that there are actually waves in the CSF, too," added Lewis.
Lewis hopes that it will one day lead to insights about a variety of neurological and psychological disorders that are frequently associated with disrupted sleep patterns, including autism and Alzheimer's disease.
To further explore how ageing might affect sleep's flow of blood and CSF in the brain, Lewis and her team plan to recruit older adults for their next study, as the 13 subjects in the current study were all between the ages of 23 and 33.
Lewis said they also hope to come up with a more sleep-conducive method of imaging CSF.
One of the most fascinating yields of this research, Lewis said, was that they can tell if a person is sleeping simply by examining a little bit of CSF on a brain scan.
"It's such a dramatic effect," she said. "[CSF pulsing during sleep] was something we didn't know happened at all, and now we can just glance at one brain region and immediately have a readout of the brain state someone's in." (ANI)