Less sleep = more responsiveness

Lately, i've been sleeping really late...

And i mean really late, like timing of 1plus 2am.

And it seems like it's already part of my system to be really sleep deprived during weekdays.

When i was young, my mother (all mothers, for that matter) will tell u that when u sleep early and wake up early, you will have good health.

Ever since i've passed the age of secondary school, sleeping before 12am is never in my habit, unless i'm PMS-sy or have some form of sickness then i'll adhere to it.

As a supporter of late-nights as a tribute to all Owl-lers, i present to you the benefits of late-nighting from a US study. Read here or read below.

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Less sleep makes you more responsive

THE above statement is actually true.

Instead of making you sluggish as most people would expect, less sleep actually makes your brain more reactive.

So says assistant professor Matthew Walker and his team of researchers from UC Berkeley and Harvard University.

Using brain-scanning equipment, they found that sleep-deprivation causes the brain's emotional centres to become '60 percent more reactive'.

The study, which was published on Monday in the journal Current Biology, is the first to use MRI technology to show areas of the brain affected by sleep deprivation.

In the study of 26 young adults, half were kept awake for 35 hours and the other half were allowed a normal night's sleep. The subjects were then hooked up to an MRI and shown a series of images, some of them pictures of graphic violence.

When shown the disturbing images, the sleep-deprived subjects had a significant jump in activity in the section of the brain that puts the body on alert to protect itself.

Activity slowed down in the section that controls logical reasoning.
Well-rested subjects showed normal brain activity.

This shows that lack of sleep can cause people to overreact to emotional challenges that they would otherwise be able to tolerate, Prof Walker said.

'If you don't get a good night's sleep, you'll be making irrational choices.'

This reactiveness causes sleep-deprived people to become jumpy and snappy.

It may also make horror movies seem scarier to them, as the brain doesn't do as good a job at separating fact from fiction.

Said Prof Walker: 'Ordinarily, if you saw a gun pointed at your face, you wouldn't overreact because your brain puts it in context and tells you that you're sitting in a movie theater staring at a screen.

'But that function seems to be disconnected when you're sleep-deprived.'