An American research team has discovered the reason for the lack of focus during the day in cases of nighttime insomnia or insufficient sleep. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that when sleep is poor at night, the brain switches during the day to a waste-cleaning mode, which usually occurs at night. They attributed the lack of focus to the sudden movement of fluids in the brain, a vital process that typically happens during deep sleep. Scientists explain that cerebrospinal fluid helps clean the brain of waste products resulting from daytime activities. The study, published in the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience, revealed that during sleep, the brain's cleaning system operates without conflicting with thinking activities. However, when a person does not get enough sleep, the brain tries to activate this function during wakefulness, which affects the efficiency of concentration. The experiment involved 26 volunteers who underwent concentration tests and magnetic resonance imaging twice: once after getting enough sleep and once after being deprived of sleep at night. It turned out that the volunteers' responses to visual and auditory stimuli were faster when they had slept well, and the reaction time was slower in cases of sleep deprivation to the extent that the volunteers missed some signals during the experiment. Researcher Laura Lewis, an assistant professor at MIT, says: "In the absence of sleep, waves of cerebrospinal fluid begin to conflict with the feeling of alertness," adding in comments reported by the medical website HealthDay: "Attention weakens during the moments when cerebrospinal fluid waves flow."
