How sleep deprivation shuts down the brain’s learning centre

Look. You’re a student. Often you may think staying up late past midnight to study or play a game is ok. It is not. You study for hours and hours on Monday, only for you to lose that knowledge on Tuesday morning. Why is that? “Could missing just one night’s sleep shut down the very part of my brain responsible for learning?”. It can, so how doessleep deprivation shut down the brain’s learning center?

1. Meet the Hippocampus: The Brain’s Inbox

Literature state that the Hippocampus is a small part of your brain that is responsible for a big job; helping “you remember, both short and long-term, and gain awareness from your environment. The hippocampus is at risk of injury or damage from underlying conditions like Alzheimer’s disease.” – Cleveland Clinic²
It is responsible for the emotional response and awareness we have to something. Such as our surroundings, is determined through this. – (Moustafa, 2021)³
The hippocampus, which is just one part of your brain, takes in your short-term memory and compiles it with similar past experience, and with the rest of the brain such as the neocortex, into long-term memory and “is concerned with hunger, motivation, mood, pain, appetite, and memory etc.”- (Anand & Dhikav, 2012)⁴

That is its core responsibility. But how would it “shut down”?

2. The Mechanism: How sleep deprivation shuts it down

“We report that a single night of sleep deprivation produces a significant deficit in hippocampal activity during episodic memory encoding, resulting in worse subsequent retention.” They say “an absence of prior sleep substantially compromises the neural and behavioral capacity for committing new experiences to memory.” – (Yoo et al., 2007)⁵

Let’s break that down.

This is from an article that targets findings on what sleep deprivation does to the brain before and/or after studying.

Meaning they have confirmed the symptoms.

In essence, sleep deprivation causes more than just tiredness. It changes how different parts of your brain communicate with each other, and stops producing the chemicals (cAMP and mTOR) needed to strengthen the neurons in your brain and are ultimately responsible in your brain for attention and alertness. “Sleep deprivation impairs hippocampal cAMP and mTOR signaling, and ultimately causes spine loss in CA1 neurons in a cofilin-dependent fashion.”- (Havekes and Abel, 2017) ⁶

This is the “Shutting down” – your brain making you less capable of learning.“…Together, these studies have started to identify the molecular underpinnings by which sleep deprivation impairs synaptic consolidation.”

And if shutting down your brain’s learning centre is the first consequence of sleep deprivation, the second is even more damaging.

3. The double whammy: Disrupted consolidation

Here’s where it just doubles down the difficulty of a Chemistry lesson for us. After having learned something, maybe Energetics, Hess’s Law, or Electrolysis, etc. The Hippocampus necessarily absorbs that information.
Then “hippocampally-initiated replay contributes to memory consolidation in the neocortex and hippocampal sharp…”
(Pedrosa et al., 2022)⁷

Which happens during sleep.

The memories that were “encoded” are denied the opportunity to be strengthened and integrated into the brain’s long-term storage networks.
In short, sleep deprivation (SD) can whammy you twice. One whilst awake (difficulty absorbing).

The other when you do not sleep on time (difficulty storing).

So the next time you think more hours studying = more learned. – It doesn’t

“There is an equation I always tell my students, that is long-term memory = Information x Emotions – which is what you learn multiplied by a state of mind, if the state of mind is not proper then it won’t retain in the long run” – Prof. Imran Razeek, Chief Chemistry Educator & Head of Department at Chembase.

4. Collateral damage: Emotional overdrive and a clumsier brain.

Losing sleep does not just cost you the reactivity chapter you studied. Like I mentioned earlier, it changes how your brain reacts to things in your surroundings. Let me elaborate a little on that for you. Your patience thinning, your eyes teary, your hands shaking, even when you yawn five times in less than an hour due to less oxygen in your brain are some of the examples of a poorly rested brain. “The findings strongly indicate that self-reported shortened total sleep time, erratic sleep/wake schedules, late bed and rise times, and poor sleep quality are negatively associated with academic performance for adolescents from middle school through the college years,” according to Wolfson and Carskadon (2003)⁸
This research also mentions the quality of sleep. Meaning even if you were to sleep 7 or 8 hours a day (minimum for an adult), you would still feel like everything is more sensitive during the day if the quality was not met.

But this is a study from 2003, where to use the internet, you had to go to a communication cafe to use a monitor that looked like a microwave and ran Windows XP with 2G wired connections, and when some of you who are reading this, may not have been born.

So what about from the years 2016 to 2026? Where the use of technology is significantly higher than any decade, even an infant is fixated on an iPad screen watching YouTube?

A 2023 study tracked people doing a visual search task (find the target, respond fast) who were without a full days worth of sleep and then measured their brain’s motor preparation signals directly.

Finally stated their results.

“visual search task’s accuracy decreased after TSD (Total Sleep Deprivation), while the response time variance increased significantly.” – (Song et al. (2023).⁹

It does not only mean that your brain is slower to pick, but it also means the time taken for your brain to get ready to pick is less reliable.
Which can cost you marks at the exam, or your life behind the wheel.

5. Actionable solutions for students and learners

The simplest actionable solution is not creating the deficit at all.

Meaning, shutting the screens off half an hour before bed, and going to bed before midnight.
But what if you did already create it?

A study conducted on 39 healthy adults tested both “hippocampal connectivity and episodic memory deficits”.
The adults firstly abstained from one full night of sleep and were then given two full nights of rest that amounted to 20 hours of total sleep.

This result was interesting from a neuroscience perspective. But for us. It’s a warning.

They said that even though TSD (Total sleep deprivation) significantly reduced memory performance, impaired hippocampal connectivity and disrupted the relationships between memory performance and hippocampal connectivity.

Two nights of sleep, however, restored hippocampal connectivity to baseline level, but did not restore memory performance and its association with hippocampal connectivity.

“These findings suggest that more than two nights of recovery sleep are needed to fully restore memory function and hippocampal-memory associations after one night of total sleep loss.” – (Chai et al., 2020)¹⁰

and another study opened with “poor or disordered sleep leads to possible impairments of cognitive and psychological functioning and to a worsened general physical health.” – (Crivello et al., 2019)¹¹

The National Sleep Foundation and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine both stated that an adult needs minimum 7 to 9 hours of sleep.
Not 5 hours and a cup of coffee to fill the rest. Something we often do.

Even with 7 to 9 hours, some literature sources state that “that there is a significant relationship between sleep quality and depression, anxiety and stress.” – (Zhakia Fathima, R Manoj and Devi, 2022)¹²

In essence:
· Get 7-9 hours of sleep
· Don’t cram studies past midnight
· When recovering, allocate 2 days for recovery, not 1.

For a student such as yourself, that’s how much your hippocampus need to complete the filing process.

Quantity and quality.

We like to stay up.

The effect of sleep is treated as a rest, a form of downtime where productivity doesn’t really grow, yet neuroscience proves otherwise.
Often thought it is less important than work, an exam coming up, and entertainment with friends.

Maybe that is where we do not stop to think, that sleep has to have its place in our day as a necessity for growth.
We may not plan for it, maybe because we know we will do it.

And everything else we did plan has more of a priority than it.

Not that we think it’s unimportant, we just like the immediate feel of another reel, texting with friends, or another added to the shop cart.

That’s where you study everything on Monday and lose everything on Tuesday. It’s not a failure of effort, just bad timing.

You were trying to save everything in to your computer only to shut it mid save. And on Tuesday, it’s nowhere to be found.

Perhaps studying in the early parts of the morning might be a better choice than staying up late trying to do the same.

So ask yourself this next time you want to scroll past midnight.

Are you gaining information or are you ridding yourself of what you’ve learned already?

Remember, you cannot outperform the biology that is working against you