Remember all the times, you were in a particularly boring class and simply dozed off? Well, it turns out that science can finally explain why we get sleepy when bored.
According to the research carried out by the University of Tsukuba, in Japan, the ‘feel good’ region of the brain that helps people enjoy food and sex also sends people to sleep.
According to the researchers, that part of the brain is densely populated by receptors that make people sleepy.
Researchers suggest that the pleasure centre of the brain is responsible for making one sleepy when bored.
Japanese researchers found that the nucleus accumbens in the forebrain had an extremely strong ability to induce sleep. They release dopamine which make people feel pleasure when one does things that are productive like eating, sex or even socialising.
But in the absence of these motivational stimuli, the same part of the brain appears to make us very tired.
According to an article published in The Daily Mail, lead author of the study Yo Oishi said that somnogen adenosine is a strong candidate for evoking the sleep effect in the nucleus accumbens.'
According to this study, published in Nature Communications, getting enough sleep does little to prevent you from craving a nap when you're bored.
However, according to them, grabbing a cup of tea and coffee might help a person from falling asleep as caffeine and adenosine are part of the same chemical family. Caffeine essentially tricks adenosine receptors.
So, once caffeine molecules bind with those receptors, they won't respond to the adenosine's sleepy signals.
