Neurons could go to sleep even when you're awake

WIRED: When deprived of sleep, parts of the human brain may doze off, secretly snatching moments of slumber even as people seem to be awake.

That could explain why our sleep-deprived selves are so cognitively challenged: We are, if not precisely half-asleep, partially asleep.

"After a long period in an awake state, cortical neurons can go briefly 'offline,'" wrote researchers led by University of Wisconsin neuroscientists Vladyslav Vyazovskiy and Giulio Tononi in a study published April 27 in Nature. "Although both EEG and behavior indicate wakefulness, local populations of neurons in the cortex may be falling asleep, with negative consequences for performance."

To study rats' neurology, Tononi's team wired their brains to an EEG machine, kept them awake longer than usual, and looked for patterns in readouts of their brains' electrical activity.

They found that scattered neurons throughout the rats' brains gradually alternated between periods of activity and inactivity — a pattern associated with deep sleep, not wakefulness. But unlike their synchronization during sleep, these oscillations were brief and disjointed.

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