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Researchers look at the brain’s ability to change and adapt in response to the stimuli that it receives from the environment, or neuroplasticity, in the motor cortex and how it is affected by deep sleep.
The motor cortex in the brain is responsible for developing and controlling motor skills, and the deep sleep boosts memory formation and processing.
This study involved six women and seven men who were asked to perform motoric tasks during the day after a night of unperturbed sleep, and after a night during which their deep sleep had been disturbed.
The tasks involved learning a series of finger movements, and the researchers were able to locate precisely the brain area responsible for learning movement.
Using an electroencephalogram, the researchers monitored the brain activity of the participants while they were sleeping.
On the first day of the experiment, the participants were able to sleep without disturbance.
On the second night, however, the researchers manipulated the participants’ sleep quality. They were able to focus on the motor cortex and disrupt their deep sleep.
The participants did not know that their deep sleep phase had been tampered with. To them, the quality of their sleep was roughly the same on both occasions.
Poor sleep keeps synapses excited, blocks the brain’s ability to learn. Researchers evaluated the participants’ ability to learn new movements. In the morning, the subjects’ learning performance was at its highest, as expected.
However, as the day progressed, they continued to make more and more mistakes because of poor sleep.