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Zoning out may be your brain’s rinse cycle
We’ve all been there…
After a night of poor or inadequate sleep, we find our attention wandering at various points during the day and sort of turning off — what we commonly refer to as zoning out.
My husband often “zones out” after a night of tossing and turning to the point where I have to repeat his name a few times to get his attention.
Well, it turns out there may be a scientific reason we zone out…
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A seconds-long nap
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used electroencephalogram (a medical test that measures the brain’s electrical activity) and functional magnetic resonance imaging scans to monitor what happens during periods of zoning out, or what the researchers called “attentional failures.”
They saw that these attentional failures were accompanied by a wave of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) flowing out of the brain before it returned a second or two later. This pattern matched the CSF waves that usually occur during deep sleep.
Experts believe this nightly fluid flow helps wash away waste products that build up during the day — sort of like a “rinse” cycle for your brain.
“If you don’t sleep, the CSF waves start to intrude into wakefulness where normally you wouldn’t see them,” says MIT neuroscientist Laura Lewis. “However, they come with an attentional trade-off, where attention fails during the moments that you have this wave of fluid flow.”
The study participants were tested twice: after a night of restful sleep and after a night in the lab without sleep. To no one’s surprise, their cognitive performance during the study tests was generally worse after the sleepless night.
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While zoning out occasionally happened after a full night’s rest, it was much more common after the participants had stayed up all night. It’s as if the brain is trying to catch up with a tiny burst of sleep, at the temporary cost of the mind’s focus.
“One way to think about those events is because your brain is so in need of sleep, it tries its best to enter into a sleep-like state to restore some cognitive functions,” says neuroscientist Zinong Yang, who led the study. “Your brain’s fluid system is trying to restore function by pushing the brain to iterate between high-attention and high-flow states.”
The outflow and influx of CSF were the most notable physiological changes accompanying periods of zoning out, but the researchers also noted slowing of breathing and heart rate, and shrinkage of the pupils.
They hypothesize that attentional failures may affect the body as a whole and are possibly managed by a single control system.
“These results suggest to us that there’s a unified circuit that’s governing both what we think of as very high-level functions of the brain — our attention, our ability to perceive and respond to the world — and then also really basic fundamental physiological processes like fluid dynamics of the brain, brain-wide blood flow and blood vessel constriction,” Lewis says.
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Supporting healthy sleep
Sleep is essential to health and well-being, and missing out on these periods of rest increases the risk of disease and impairs certain parts of the brain. If you struggle to get enough good-quality sleep, here are a couple of supplements that might help:
- Melatonin is proven to help with sleep. The standard recommendation is 1 to 2 milligrams about 30 minutes before bedtime. You can work your way up to 5 milligrams, but don’t take more than 10 milligrams at a time, or you could risk side effects that include drowsiness, headaches, dizziness, confusion, nausea, vomiting, irritability and waking up in the night. If you find melatonin isn’t helping, you may have low vitamin D levels. They work together to regulate the body’s circadian rhythm and sleep patterns.
- L-theanine, an amino acid found in green tea, is also a great option for sleep and helps fight off the stress that keeps you up at night. Start with about 250 to 400 mg per day, a similar dosage to what’s been used successfully and safely in studies to relieve stress.
If you’re on medication, it’s a good idea to let your prescribing doctor know about any supplements you plan to take.
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Sources:
Zoning Out May Be Your Brain’s Rinse Cycle, Study Finds — Science Alert
Attentional failures after sleep deprivation are locked to joint neurovascular, pupil and cerebrospinal fluid flow dynamics — Nature Neuroscience
By Carolyn Gretton
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