Hippocampus Essay

1137 Words3 Pages

Through studies performed on sleep-deprived rats, experimental results have shown a decrease in cellular activity in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is responsible for most of the brain’s memory processing. When entering into sleep deprivation, the brain will experience consequences such as a failure for the hippocampus to encode, consolidate, or retrieve signals powering memory processing. As a result, researchers are looking for cellular characteristics that could lead to further details into the relationship between sleep deprivation and memory impairment. There are several different ways memory can be disrupted, one suggested in being an imbalance of neurotransmitters in the hippocampal region of the brain. Both hormonal and oxidative stress are also factors that are observed to play major roles of memory impairment in the hippocampus. These …show more content…

However, scientists are beginning to uncover that stress can also inhibit the plasticity and neurogenesis within the hippocampus. By inhibiting these processes, stress can negatively influence the mechanism responsible for memory consolidation in the brain. These effects, if not treated promptly with suitable sleep, could have harmful and damaging effects on nerve cells in the hippocampus. By identifying these effects within sleep deprivation, scientists can formulate new effective drugs and mechanisms to enhance memory impairment caused by sleep loss. Chronic sleep loss is becoming more common in modern culture and less restricted to sleep-deprived diseases such as insomnia. Suggested to be the result of a number car, industrial, medical, and other occupational accidents, sleep deprivation is beginning to be recognized as a public concern. As a result, the Centers for Disease Control

Open Document