That brain activity was compared to other mice which had been deprived of sleep. As they went about their routines, electrodes were used to monitor individual neurons – brain cells that transmit messages – over several days and nights to determine how their activity changed during sleep. One group of experimental mice carried on as they normally would, sleeping and waking up when they wanted to. He and his colleagues probed the brain of mice and rats to study sleep-loss conditions as part of the EU-funded SLEEPNEED project.

‘If I look at the activity recorded from the brain of a human and a mouse, I can’t tell it apart,’ said Dr Vyazovskiy. But how exactly does sleep loss affect your brain? To study the effects of sleep, one of the first things to note is that, on the neuronal level at least, sleep looks almost the same in humans and animals. It’s hard to focus when you’re tired, and complicated tasks seem daunting. However, there is no doubt that a night of poor sleep affects cognitive abilities the next day. ‘It isn’t only about sleep duration either but also about sleep quality.’ ‘The amount of sleep people need is highly individual,’ said Dr Vlad Vyazovskiy, a sleep researcher from the University of Oxford in the UK. I didn’t want to share it with anyone else.As a general rule, it’s recommended that adults get seven or eight hours of sleep per night, although that may not be the right guideline for everyone. We were shopping together for the first time, shooting the shit for the first time, and despite all my usual inclinations, I had no desire to rush to document it. I thought about taking my phone out of my bag and showing him, but I also didn’t want to bring my Phone World into Our World. Why not just look at them?” I didn’t have an answer to that. He thought about that for a minute and said, “But there are people all around right here. There were mostly no long-distance fees there were photos and videos - basically the whole world could be on these screens. Sometimes those people were far away, or people they didn’t even know. I tried to explain that there were often other people to talk to or look at on phones. He couldn’t fathom what could be happening on the phone that kept them so entranced. He didn’t understand why everyone walked around looking down at their phones. My dad and I went shopping for new clothes for him.

Game Between Him Were Sleeping