The brain is a sensitive organ. It needs the right nutrition, it needs oxygen, and hydration. It needs aminos and fats. But sleep also affects the brain, or lack of it, and another way that we can lose brain integration is via sleep deprivation.
Below is an excerpt from a research article posted on DANA on sleep and the ability to make sound decisions.
"The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), located at the front of the brain behind the eyes, reacts to the mistake and thereby helps us alter our behavior, according to Geoffrey Schoenbaum, an assistant professor in the department of anatomy and neurobiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
"The OFC enables us to recognize when things don’t go as we expected,” Schoenbaum said. “Damage to the OFC results in deficits in what we call reversal learning—the ability to go back and reconsider a decision based on the outcome. The OFC is well-known for its role in good judgment, for allowing us to use what we think we know about likely outcomes to guide decision making, but the OFC also enables us to recognize and learn from things that don’t go as we expected. "Changes in the OFC may be involved in the addict's compulsive seeking of drugs (or their addiction) behavior."
Lack of sleep compromises decision making. Vinod Venkatraman and his colleagues at Duke University and National University of Singapore demonstrated that sleep-deprived gamblers are more inclined to make high-risk bets, apparently because they overestimate their chances of winning.
The researchers scanned the brains of 28 young adults (with a mean age of 22.3 years) who were playing a gambling game that involved various risk strategies. They repeated the scans after the subjects had gone for 24 hours without sleep. The participants no longer embraced a strategy of avoiding losses; instead they went for big gains despite the threat of big losses.
Brain scans showed that when the subjects were sleep-deprived, they displayed less activation in the insular cortex, a region associated with negative moods and emotions. Gains produced greater activation in the striatum, which contains many receptors for dopamine, the neurotransmitter released abundantly after taking cocaine or other recreational drugs.
“Sleep deprivation promotes risk-seeking behavior by increasing neural responses to anticipated gains in regions associated with reward processes, particularly the ventral striatum and ventral medial prefrontal cortex,” Venkatraman said. “It also diminishes sensitivity to losses.”
Click to read full article on DANA