Brains of People Suffering from Insomnia Struggle

Brain scans of people who tested positive for insomnia showed differences in their brain's functions compared with people who get a full night's sleep, according to a study published Friday.

Researchers at the University of California said that poor sleepers struggled to focus a part of their brain during memory tests.

Experts have said that the brain's wiring may actually be affecting perceptions of sleep quality.

The study which was published in the journal Sleep compared 25 people who said they had insomnia and 25 people who described themselves as quality sleepers. MRI brain scans were carried out while they performed increasingly challenging memory tests.

"We found that insomnia subjects did not properly turn on brain regions critical to a working memory task and did not turn off "mind-wandering" brain regions irrelevant to the task," said Professor Sean Drummond, one of the researchers of the study.

"This data helps us understand that people with insomnia not only have trouble sleeping at night, but their brains are not functioning as efficiently during the day as well," he further said.

A sleep researcher in the UK, Dr. Neil Stanley said that the quality of the "sleep each group was having was very similar, even though one set was reporting insomnia.