Lack of sleep can damage your brain

Most people say children's brains grow when they sleep, but as adults we need sleep for different reasons. Researchers have long known that lack of sleep can be bad for your health, affecting everything from immune function to cognitive acuity.

The components of the brain that carry information to Long-term memory turn off while sleeping. For the same reason, dreams quickly fade out after you wake up. Although you may have quite a few dreams in a night, they aren’t being memorialized into Long-term memory. Normally only the fragments of a dream left in Short-term memory have a possibility to be converted after you wake up.

According to studies the record for the longest time for someone to go without sleep is 18 days, 21 hours and 40minutes. The individual who participated reported hallucination, paranoia, blurred vision, slurred speech, memory and concentration lapses.

Getting too little sleep creates a "sleep debt," which is much like being overdrawn at a bank. Eventually, your body will demand that the debt be repaid.

Sooner or later your body will just shut down, without your control. Remember Nightmare on Elm Street? How the characters bodies shut down without them knowing they were asleep.

Source: Facts to Demystify the Brain

Lack of sleep and the brain