Electrophysiological measures of alertness and performance during sleep deprivation

睡眠不足是现代社会的一个主要问题。许多人愿意减少睡眠时间，以腾出更多时间用于工作和社交活动，而另一些人则因为轮班工作、正常衰老或睡眠障碍而无法获得所需的睡眠。睡眠不足会对情绪、警觉性、工作效率和安全产生直接影响，导致学校学习成绩下降，汽车事故增加，以及灾难性的工业错误。实验研究中最可靠的发现是，睡眠不足会导致反应时间减慢和持续注意力不足。一个困倦的人有时也许能百分之百准确地做事；然而，他们会经历注意力缺失（即，错过或延迟的反应），随着睡眠缺失程度的恶化，这种情况发生得更频繁，持续的时间更长。研究人员还没有完全了解睡眠不足时这些行为失误的大脑基础。由于在困倦期间观察到的表现缺陷类型，研究人员推测这些缺陷与大脑额叶区域的功能障碍有关。脑成像研究也支持这一观点。我目前的研究目标是利用脑电图和事件相关电位等技术来了解大脑在睡眠不足时是如何控制行为的，这些技术可以作为觉醒和注意力的测量手段。在完全剥夺睡眠30小时后，我们将观察大脑在执行涉及额叶功能的任务时的活动模式（例如，工作记忆或处理新刺激）。此外，我们将研究行为失误之前的大脑活动，以预测表现失败。我们还旨在确定预测谁最容易或最能适应睡眠不足的因素（例如，年龄、性别、睡眠不足的经历）。了解大脑如何在睡眠不足的挑战中控制唤醒和注意力的快速波动，将提高我们对睡眠在清醒功能中的作用的理解，以及我们对大脑功能的总体理解。此外，这项研究将为提高人类在困倦条件下的生产力和安全性带来实用的创新。

Sleep loss is a major problem in modern society. Many people willingly cut down on their sleep to make more time for work and social demands, while others cannot get the sleep they need because of shift work, normal aging, or sleep disorders. Sleep loss has immediate consequences for mood, alertness, productivity, and safety, leading to poor learning in schools, increased automobile accidents, and catastrophic industrial errors. The most reliable finding from experimental studies is that sleep loss leads to slowed reaction time and deficits in sustained attention. A sleepy person may be able to perform with 100 percent accuracy at times; however, they will experience lapses in attention (that is, missed or delayed responses) which occur more frequently and for longer periods of time as the degree of sleep loss worsens. Researchers do not yet fully understand the brain basis of these behavioural lapses during sleep loss. Because of the type of performance deficits observed during sleepiness, researchers theorize that these deficits are related to dysfunction of the frontal brain regions. There is also some support for this from brain imaging studies. The goal of my current research is to understand how the brain controls behaviour during sleep loss using techniques like EEG and event-related potentials as measures of arousal and attention. Following 30 hours of total sleep deprivation, we will look at patterns of brain activity during performance of tasks involving frontal lobe function (e.g., working memory or processing novel stimuli). Moreover, we will investigate brain activity immediately prior to behavioural lapses in order to predict performance failure. We also aim to identify factors that predict who will be most vulnerable or resilient to sleep loss (e.g., age, gender, experience with sleep loss). Understanding how the brain controls rapid fluctuations in arousal and attention during a sleep loss challenge will improve our understanding of the role of sleep in waking function, and our understanding of brain function in general. Moreover, this research will lead to practical innovations for improving human productivity and safety under conditions of sleepiness.