Sleep Deprivation Affects Many Areas in the Human Brain

Many American adults don't get enough sleep. Chronic sleep deprivation can cause unpleasant and dangerous consequences. People that continually don't sleep may shorten their lives. Most adults need to sleep at least eight hours or more each night in order to avoid sleep deprivation symptoms. Many things can keep people awake such as snoring, sleep apnea, insomnia and stress. Caffeine, nicotine and alcoholic drinks are bedtime stimulants that may cause sleeplessness. Sugar is another stimulant that may keep you awake. You might feel sleepy at first as your blood sugar increases then lowers but you could wake up later and stay awake.

Cognitive and physiological problems such as memory impairment and mental reaction time can arise from not getting satisfactory rest. Adequate sleep is critical for proper brain functioning or the brain will not operate at its peak. Sleep is necessary to renew parts of the brain and to have enough time to prepare and store information for good thinking skills. The brain will work harder to make up for lack of sleep but even then the mental response time will be slower then normal. There are researchers that suppose the brain doesn't function normally without enough sleep because of the interruption to certain patterns of electrical and chemical activity. The brain needs enough time to organize and store information in order to amend thinking skills.

An active area of the brain is the temporal lobe of cerbral cortex which has to do with processing of language. This part of the brain becomes inactive from sleep deprivation resulting in slurred speech. The cerbral cortex can only rest and recover during sleep. Speech and creative thinking come from function of the frontal lobe of the brain. There have been studies done that show test subjects have difficulty thinking of inventive words. They also don't have the ability to make or implement logical decisions. Scientists think that the slurring, stuttering and using repetitious words occur because the speech center of the brain stops working.