Brain and sleep

Neuroscientists have discovered that a good night's rest means hard work for some parts of brain.

American neuroscientists have discovered that a good night's rest means hard work for some parts of brain.

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The discovery shows that sleep is valuable for consolidating new information and is not a simple standby mode and local brain processing during the night leads to new skills being more firmly cemented.

Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues measured electrical brain signals in subjects who learned a simple computer game before going to sleep.

The kind of activity that occurs during sleep was increased in a penny-sized region in the brains of slumbering subjects who had learned the game. And someone with more of such activity in this area, which is in the top right hemisphere, tends to perform better in the morning.

This is the first time that waking behaviour has been shown to affect a specific part of the human brain during slumber. "It's a very elegant study," The Nature quoted Robert Knight, a neuroscientist of the University of California, as saying.