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Channel: Health & FamilyTag: Sleep | Health & Family | TIME.com
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Insomniac? You Might Have a Hyperactive Brain

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Almost everyone has trouble sleeping once in a while – worries from the day have a tendency to stick in your brain and spill over into the night, and keep you from mentally taking the break your brain needs to recharge. But for 15% of American adults, not being able to sleep is a chronic problem that can interfere with memory and concentration. And according to the latest research, the reason may have to do with the way their brains work. Dr. Rachel Salas, an assistant professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and her colleagues studied how plastic, or adaptable, the brains of 18 insomniacs and 10 good sleepers were, using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation. Through electrodes placed around the skull, the team could precisely and painlessly deliver electromagnetic currents to specific parts of the brain. TMS is approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat depression and migraines by disrupting the circuits that can lead to symptoms of those conditions. Salas found that TMS could have a similar role in helping insomnia patients. MORE: 4 Apps to Help You Sleep Better To determine brain plasticity, she measured brain activity with electroencephalograms (EEG) while she pulsed each participant in an area of the brain that controls the thumb muscle, and observed in which direction – left, and up, for example – the thumb moved by default when targeted. Without TMS, she then asked the participants to reverse the default movement when prompted – so if their thumbs moved to the left and upward, the volunteers were supposed to move their thumb to the right and downward. Salas and her team figured that given the memory problems and concentration issues people with insomnia showed in previous studies, that they would do less well in performing this task than the good sleepers – in other words, that they would make more mistakes or have trouble even learning the task to begin with. To their surprise, however, that wasn’t the case. Reporting in the journal Sleep, the

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