Originally, Salas assumed that deep sleepers had more plastic and attentive brains. She explained that brain plasticity is how easily neural pathways can be tailored by experience and adapt to change. Salas set up a sleep study including 28 participants: 18 who suffered from chronic insomnia for more than a year and 10 people with no trouble sleeping.

Each subject was given 65 electrical pulses to the brain using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), targeting a specific point in the motor cortex. The researchers focused on stimulating involuntary movements of each person’s thumb and then asked volunteers to move their thumbs for 30 minutes in the opposite direction (without electromagnetic currents) as the uncontrolled reaction caused by the experiment.

The volunteers were then pulsed a second time to see if their brains had learned to move their thumbs in the new direction. If the thumbs twitched in the new path, it showed that the brain was adaptable to change.

Salas assumed that because lack of sleep has been associated with decreased memory and concentration during the day, the brains of the sound sleepers would be more easily trained. Ironically, the opposite was true. The results showed that plasticity was more prevalent in the brains of individuals with insomnia. Salas’ report also found a link between increased plasticity and amplified excitability. So basically, insomniacs have more ongoing brain activity than deep sleepers.

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