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，以便有更多的时间用于工作和社交需求，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、生产力和安全性产生直接影响，导致学校学习不良、车祸增加和灾难性的工业错误。 实验研究最可靠的发现是，睡眠不足会导致反应时间减慢和持续注意力不足。一个昏昏欲睡的人有时可能能够以100%的准确率执行;然而，他们会经历注意力的缺失（即错过或延迟反应），随着睡眠不足的程度增加，这种情况发生得更频繁，持续时间更长。研究人员还没有完全理解睡眠不足时这些行为失误的大脑基础。由于在睡眠期间观察到的表现缺陷类型，研究人员认为这些缺陷与额叶脑区域的功能障碍有关。脑成像研究也支持这一点。我目前研究的目标是了解大脑如何在睡眠不足时控制行为，使用EEG和事件相关电位等技术作为唤醒和注意力的测量方法。在30小时的完全睡眠剥夺后，我们将观察在执行涉及额叶功能的任务时大脑活动的模式（例如，工作记忆或处理新刺激）。此外，我们将调查行为失误前的大脑活动，以预测表现失败。我们还旨在确定预测谁最容易受到睡眠不足的影响或最有弹性的因素（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，这项研究将带来实用创新，以提高人类在困倦条件下的生产力和安全性。

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.