Sleep Deprivation Can Threaten Competent Decision-Making, Judicial Sleepiness Regarded With High Level Of Negativity

Gambling is a risky activity that can potentially result in the loss of a significant amount of money. Sleep deprivation can adversely affect a person’s decision-making at a gambling table by elevating the expectation of gains and making light of one’s losses following risky decisions.

To understand the neural underpinnings of risky decision making under conditions of sleep deprivation, Vinod Venkatraman and colleagues of Duke University studied healthy volunteers as they underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the use of MRI to measure the haemodynamic response related to neural activity in the brain or spinal cord of humans.

The authors found that the nucleus accumbens, an area in the brain involved with the anticipation of reward becomes selectively more active when high risk-high payoff choices were made under conditions of sleep deprivation.

Further, the number of high risk decisions did not increase with sleep deprivation, but the expectation of being rewarded for making the high risk gamble was elevated.

Allied to this finding was the observation that there was an attenuated response to losses in the insula, a part of the brain involved with evaluating the emotional significance of an event.