Researchers may have found what it is that makes insomniacs' brains different from those who have no sleeping problems. The brains of insomniacs are more active during the day and are more difficult to "turn off" at night.
A new preliminary study analyzed 28 people aged 50 and older. Of this number, 18 suffered from insomnia for at least a year, and 10 considered themselves good sleepers. Researchers wanted to measure the participants' brains' plasticity, or the brain's ability to remake itself with each moment that the brain learns new things and makes new memories. This is the brain's ability to adapt and keep with the things that it needs to deal with.
The participants were fitted with electrodes and an accelerometer on their dominant thumb. Then they were given 65 electrical impulses through electromagnetic current stimulating areas of the motor cortex in the brain. The involuntary thumb movements of the participants were measured, and then the researchers trained each participant for 30 minutes to move their thumb in the opposite direction of the original involuntary movement. Then the electrical impulses were given again.
The researchers believed that those participants who were able to successfully move their thumbs in the direction in which the thumbs were trained, were the ones most likely to have more plastic motor cortexes. Instead, the researchers found results that were exactly the opposite. The findings were published in the journal Sleep.
The researchers found that the brains of insomniacs were much more busy than those of normal sleepers, as if these brains were constantly being activated. The findings now provide scientific evidence for the claim of many insomniacs that they cannot seem to shut their brains down for sleep.
However, despite the overly active insomniac's brain during daytime, their lack of sleep still cannot compensate for the possible accidents and mistakes that often plague the sleep-deprived.
"When you give an insomnia patient an easy task, they may do well, just as well as a good sleeper," said Dr. Rachel Salas, an assistant professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "The minute you give them something more complicated, that's where they start to break down."
Scientists have always suspected that sleep is important for brain plasticity, but have been unable to provide scientific and empirical evidence of a direct link between sleep and brain plasticity. It is also not clear to them if insomniacs have difficulty sleeping because they tend to have more active brains, or if the lack of sleep causes the brain to be more hyperactive.
However, this study seems to point the researchers toward the direction of a hyperactive brain as the cause of insomnia, and efforts to come up with a treatment for this can be the next task at hand. Still this study's researchers say they are going to probe deeper into the matter, and perhaps figure out the limits of plasticity.
"We hope to give insomniacs in a future study a more complicated task to see how the brain adapts and changes," said Salas.
