They found that areas of the brain that form the theory of mind network, which is engaged when people empathize with others or try to understand other people's wants and needs, were less active after a sleepless night. In the first study, the scientists placed 24 healthy volunteers in a functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI) to scan their brains after eight hours of sleep and after a night of no sleep. The new report describes three separate studies that assessed the impact of sleep loss on people's willingness to help others. Sleeplessness dampens theory of mind network He and Ben Simon are members of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley. Walker is the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. "If you're not getting enough sleep, it doesn't just hurt your own well-being, it hurts the well-being of your entire social circle, including strangers."īen Simon, Walker and colleagues Raphael Vallat and Aubrey Rossi will publish their results August 23 in the open access journal PLOS Biology. "We're starting to see more and more studies, including this one, where the effects of sleep loss don't just stop at the individual, but propagate to those around us," said Ben Simon. How we operate as a social species - and we are a social species - seems profoundly dependent on how much sleep we are getting." "But this new work demonstrates that a lack of sleep not only damages the health of an individual, but degrades social interactions between individuals and, furthermore, degrades the very fabric of human society itself. Indeed, we've not been able to discover a single major psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal," Walker said. "Over the past 20 years, we have discovered a very intimate link between our sleep health and our mental health. The study, led by UC Berkeley research scientist Eti Ben Simon and Matthew Walker, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology, adds to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that inadequate sleep not only harms the mental and physical well-being of an individual, but also compromises the bonds between individuals - and even the altruistic sentiment of an entire nation.
In one portion of the new study, the scientists showed that charitable giving in the week after the beginning of Daylight Saving Time, when residents of most states "spring forward" and lose one hour of their day, dropped by 10% - a decrease not seen in states that do not change their clocks or when states return to standard time in the fall. However, these new discoveries show that a lack of sleep also impairs our basic social conscience, making us withdraw our desire and willingness to help other people.
Lack of sleep is known to be associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, depression, diabetes, hypertension and overall mortality.
0 kommentar(er)
