HEALTH AND WELL-BEING


cience of


2018. It also found that people who slept more than this were just as impaired as people who slept less.1


Participants’ reasoning and


verbal abilities were most strongly affected by sleep while short-term memory performance was relatively unaffected. ‘Sleep is the single most effective thing people can do to reset brain and body health each day,’ writes


neuroscientist Matthew Walker in his book Why We Sleep.2


Walker is


founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley, US. His team recently published research on the relationship between sleep and pain.


In one study, Walker’s team


kept healthy young adults awake through the night in the lab.3


In


pain sensitivity tests the next day, the researchers observed increased activity in the primary sensing regions of the brain (the primary somatosensory cortex) and reduced activity in other regions – the striatum and insula – that modulate pain processing. That is, sleep deprivation amplified sensitivity to pain.


In a second online study using


06 | 2019 27


eep


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