Frontal Lobe

Since being in this class I have come to learn that sleep can affect so many things within our lives, our mood, our behavior, how we think and act, and even our weight. But I am still in awe of the mighty power of sleep and how easy it is to take it for granted but unfortunately it is not so easy to recover from it, and that can have terrible consequences to various parts of our brain and its overall function. How long do you think you would have to sleep in order to fix your sleep debt?

In the article Frontal Lobe, it explains how total sleep deprivation has many terrible effects on your frontal lobe including: reduced response inhibition, decision making, thought process, and speech. It also affects our alertness and relative metabolic rates. SO the experimenters set out to test whether relative cerebral glucose metabolism in the frontal lobe would be decreased as a result of total sleep deprivation. They tested their hypothesis using 32 subjects giving all of them IV’s filled with 5 mCi of FDG and simultaneously taking a performance test.

In their “After Sleep Deprivation” results they found that there was significant decline in metabolism cortical association regions (frontal lobe, temporal and occipital cortex, and subcortical system) as well as an increase in metabolism in cortical regions. Also in the “After Sleep Deprivation” there was significant relative increases in metabolism in cortical regions and also relative decreases in metabolism in subcortical areas.

I thought this article was interesting and different than any other article we’ve done so far in that it focuses more of how sleep deprivation directly affects the brain and the specific areas that it has a direct impact on.

It’s important for the public to know how sleep deprivation works and what it really does to the body, it practically sucks the life out of us and messes with all of our faculties. I know when I am dog tired I feel like I am slowly losing my mind, I can’t focus or concentrate on what I need to do, and it’s like there is a bunch of noise going on in my head and I can’t formulate a proper thought or sentence. It is important for people to know that you need sleep more so than just for the sake of not being cranky, building up all the sleep debt can seriously hurt you in the long run.