Do we often find ourself falling asleep or feeling sleepy at an important meeting, a lecture or a class? or noticing parliamentarians sleeping in parliament during the session. The 'boring' nature of the meeting or the class is undoubtedly the one to blame, isn't it? Well, as per a study, it isn't the boredom, but our neurons that are to blame.
Neurons in a brain area are associated with reward and motivation. A part of the brain which, researchers found, is the nucleus accumbens that can also produce sleep. Researchers from the University of Tsukuba and Fudan University used chemo-genetic and optical techniques to remotely control the activities of nucleus accumbens neurons and the behaviours they mediate. They discovered that nucleus accumbens neurons have an extremely strong ability to induce sleep that is indistinguishable from the major component of natural sleep, known as…
