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- Why not getting enough sleep could be driving you crazy.

We've all been there: "Just five minutes more" you plead with the alarm clock as you hit the snooze button and snuggle back under the covers. Then suddenly it's ten to eight - how did that happen? Still half-asleep, you grudgingly get out of bed to grumble your way through the day in a fug of tiredness and woe betide the workmate who asks you to make some extra photocopies or re-send a fax.

That lack of sleep makes you grumpy isn't news to anyone.

But a joint team of scientists from the University of California Berkeley and Harvard Medical School has recently made headlines by claiming there's a neurological basis behind the bad mood.

In a ground-breaking study published in Current Biology, brain images of otherwise healthy young men and women revealed that, when deprived of sleep, the brain reverts to a primitive "fight or flight" state, "unable to put emotional experiences into context and produce controlled, appropriate responses."

(http://www.current -biology.com/content/article/a bstract?uid=PIIS09609822070178 36&highlight=walker)
(http://ww w.berkeley.edu/news/media/rele ases/2007/10/22_sleeploss.shtm l)

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), researchers were able to study the brain activity of two groups of volunteers - those who had slept normally and a second group who had been kept awake for thirty-five hours. During the procedure, each group was shown 100 picture cards, including images of mutilated bodies and children with tumours. While the scans of the well-rested volunteers indicated normal brain activity, when confronted with the negative stimuli the sleep-derived brain was found to redirect activity away from the prefrontal cortex - responsible for reason and logic - to the amygdala, the brain's emotional centre and the area of the brain most closely related to depression, anxiety and other psychiatric disorders.

In other words, not getting enough sleep could be enough to drive you crazy.

The study's authors hope that their research will lay the foundation for greater exploration into the relationship between sleep and psychiatric disorders. While clinical evidence has long suggested that sleep disruption is common to almost all psychiatric disorders, these experiments are unique in demonstrating that even healthy brains react unhealthily when sleep deprived.

(http://www.reuters.c om/article/scienceNews/idUSN24 62068320071024)

- Are you getting enough sleep?

As we get older, we typically spend

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