Insomniacs' brains lose focus, scans suggest

Brain scans of people who say they have
insomnia have shown differences in brain
function compared with people who get a
full night's sleep.
Researchers at the University of California, San
Diego, said the poor sleepers struggled to
focus part of their brain in memory tests.
Other experts said that the brain's wiring may
actually be affecting perceptions of sleep
quality.
The findings were published in the journal
Sleep.
People with insomnia struggle to sleep at
night, but it also has consequences during the
day such as delayed reaction times and
memory.
The study compared 25 people who said they
had insomnia with 25 who described
themselves as good sleepers. MRI brain scans
were carried out while they performed
increasingly challenging memory tests.
One of the researchers, Prof Sean Drummond,
said: "We found that insomnia subjects did not
properly turn on brain regions critical to a
working memory task and did not turn off
'mind-wandering' brain regions irrelevant to
the task.
"This data helps us understand that people
with insomnia not only have trouble sleeping
at night, but their brains are not functioning
as efficiently during the day."
A sleep researcher in the UK, Dr Neil Stanley,
said that the quality of the sleep each group
was having was very similar, even though one
set was reporting insomnia.
He said: "What's the chicken and what's the
egg? Is the brain different and causing them to
report worse sleep?
"Maybe they're perceiving what happened in
the night differently; maybe what is affecting
their working memory and ability to focus on
the task at hand is also causing insomnia."