To sleep... perchance to learn

AFP, February, 2007

PARIS (AFP) — Researchers may have found the reason why children who go to bed too late often fare badly at school: lack of sleep appears to disrupt functioning of the hippocampus, an area of the brain that formulates new memories.

Reporting Sunday in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Harvard Medical School investigators recruited 28 volunteers, who were either randomly deprived of sleep for two days and a night before carrying out a test, or who were allowed to sleep normally.

The test involving looking at and remembering a large set of picture slides while the volunteers were screened by fMRI scanner, which gives a 3-D image of blood flow, hence of cerebral activity.

The human guinea pigs were then allowed two full nights of sleep and then performed a second test in which they were asked to spot the original slides in a batch that included new pictures.

The ...