Sleep Deprivation Messes with Emotions. Thanks A Lot, Neanderthals.
- Posted by glen on October 23rd, 2007
LiveScience is reporting that sleep-deprivation allows our brains to overreact to bad experience.
“While we predicted that the emotional centers of the brain would overreact after sleep deprivation, we didn’t predict they’d overreact as much as they did,” Walker said. “They became more than 60 percent more reactive to negative emotional stimuli. That’s a whopping increaseâ€â€the emotional parts of the brain just seem to run amok.”
Apparently this absurd response is a more primitive reaction to sleep loss. This makes sense to me. A caveman out hunting mammoth until 4 AM is bound to be a little cranky when he comes home to find his wife ate the last of the rat-n-snake stew. Or he wakes up the next morning only to learn that local Neanderthal vandals chipped away at his wheel in the early morning. Argh! If only our caveman had gotten a little more sleep…
“When we’re sleep deprived, it’s really as if the brain is reverting to more primitive behavior, regressing in terms of the control humans normally have over their emotions,” researcher Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told LiveScience.
Photo by cote.
October 23rd, 2007 at 8:42 pm
Makes sense, especially thinking of my own experiences…and that pic is SCARY.
October 24th, 2007 at 12:58 am
[...] glen placed an interesting blog post on Sleep Deprivation Messes with Emotions. Thanks A Lot, Neanderthals..Here’s a brief overview:“While we predicted that the emotional centers of the brain would overreact after sleep deprivation, we didn’t predict they’d overreact as much as they did,†Walker said. “They became more than 60 percent more reactive to negative … [...]
October 24th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
dont know where to put this message, dont see contact/feedback info. getting this error when trying to access the ‘tools’ section
Couldn’t write to: /home/lifedev/public_html/tools/wp-content/cache/wp-cache-a1193728e2cb1aae91b2caecd58873d7.html
October 29th, 2007 at 5:46 am
I can attest to this with some of the posts I have made while tired and angry.
The question is whether to go back an edit them or let them stand.
November 11th, 2007 at 4:01 am
[...] Charles Q. Choi over at LiveScience covers some research on how Emotions Run Amok in Sleep-Deprived Brains. So, if you’re constantly depriving yourself of sleep, perhaps this would be a good time to catch some extra Zzz. [found via LifeDev [...]
November 27th, 2007 at 12:05 am
I sure notice that I lose my mental edge when I get sleep deprived. My mind seems to turn to mush!