Question: If you are sleep deprived, do parts of your brain stop working?

Anna Ashton answered on 16 Mar 2015:

Good question!

I don’t think a lot of research has been done into this. I know that researchers have done brain scans of sleep-deprived people using fMRI. This is a way of looking at which parts of the brain are active by measuring the blood flow, because if there’s more blood flow to an area it probably means it’s more active as it’ll need more oxygen and energy delivered to it via the blood.

The interesting thing is that it’s the opposite of what you’d expect, they found that an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (which is used for things like logical reasoning) was more active in the people who were sleep-deprived! The researchers think this is because the brain of the sleep-deprived people had to work harder than a non-sleep deprived person in order to a complete a task, and so was seen as being more active on the fMRI scan.
This may not be the case for all brain areas though, it may depend on the brain area and what it does. I know I feel like my parts of my brain have shut down when I haven’t had any sleep!

Hope that answers your question