All day brain tracking helps scientists finally decode fatigue
Most of the time, you assume your brain is either “on” or “off,” awake or asleep. A new study shows something far more intricate. Deep inside the skull, entire networks of cells quietly hand off control across the day, like shifts of workers trading places on a factory floor. An international team led by the University of Michigan has mapped which parts of the brain are active at different times of day, down to the level of single cells, in mice. Their work offers a rare, global view of how activity moves through the brain as animals wake, stay up, and finally sleep. Tracking a Day in the Life of a Brain The project started with a deceptively simple goal: understand fatigue. Senior author Daniel Forger, a professor of mathematics at Michigan, and his colleagues wanted to see how the brain changes as wakefulness drags on and how sleep resets those changes. Overall framework to identify, digitize, and analyze the active neurons or networks in the mouse brain. (CREDIT: PLOS Biology) “We’re seeing profound changes …
