This effect has been suggested for several decades!
Notice the excellent graphical material provided with this research!
"Synaptic connections between brain cells become stronger when an animal is awake, raising energy consumption and causing the buildup of proteins, which limits the capacity for learning.1 While scientists believe that sleep fixes this imbalance, they didn’t have much human evidence to support this hypothesis.
Now, ... sleep scientist ... used positron emission tomography (PET) to test whether the synaptic hypothesis of sleep holds true in humans. The findings ... indicate that wakefulness does strengthen synaptic connections in human brains, providing molecular evidence behind the neurobiology of sleep. ..."
From the abstract:
"Sleep is essential for synaptic homeostasis, a proposed mechanism whereby wakefulness leads to synaptic potentiation and sleep facilitates synaptic down-selection. Synaptic vesicle glycoprotein 2A (SV2A), whose availability is quantifiable by [¹⁸F]SynVesT-1 positron emission tomography (PET), is commonly interpreted as a proxy for synaptic density.
In this randomized study, we examined 40 healthy adults (mean age 27.5 ± 6.5 years) who underwent two [¹⁸F]SynVesT-1 PET scans on consecutive days.
Half of the participants were assigned to the normal sleep (i.e., control) condition and half to the sleep deprivation condition.
Scans were performed at the same circadian time point, approximately 4 h after awakening in the control group and during baseline in the sleep deprivation group or after ~28 h of continuous wakefulness in the sleep deprivation group after sleep deprivation.
Sleep deprivation led to significant increases in synaptic vesicle glycoprotein 2A binding in multiple brain regions, including the thalamus (+4.6%), hippocampus (+5.6%), and parietal cortex (+3.2%), whereas no changes were observed in controls.
The degree of increase in synaptic vesicle glycoprotein 2A positively correlated with elevated slow wave activity during recovery sleep, a physiological marker of sleep pressure.
These findings provide in vivo support for the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis in humans and suggest that synaptic vesicle glycoprotein 2A PET imaging is sensitive to sleep-wake dependent synaptic plasticity."
A Night Without Sleep Alters Synaptic Density in the Brain (original news release) "What happens in the brain when people stay awake all night? A new PET/MRI study by researchers at the Forschungszentrum Jülich involving 40 healthy adults provides one of the most direct indications to date in humans: After approximately 28.5 hours of wakefulness, a marker of synaptic density was elevated in several brain regions. Synapses are the contact points through which nerve cells exchange information. The finding supports the assumption that sleep is not just rest, but helps the brain restore balance to its neural connections."
Sleep deprivation increases levels of the synaptic density marker SV2A in the human brain (open access)
I did not know that sleep deprivation could be so beautiful! Just kidding!
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