Sleep deprivation is one of the most common forms of mental impairment, as it reduces performance in a variety of cognitive and motor tasks. A new paper has identified what might be the cause of this poor performance: small parts of a mammal's brain appear to go into a sleep-like state while they're otherwise apparently awake. And, in rats, the degree to which the brain is experiencing these tiny episodes of sleep correlates with their decline in performance on a simple task.
The study relies on differences in the resolution at which we measure neural activity. On a crude level, rats and humans show a similar pattern of neural activity when non-REM sleep is recorded with an EEG: rhythmic peaks of activity, in between which the brain goes largely silent, with the neurons effectively "offline," as the authors call it.
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