Succumbing to “sleep pressure” (Image: Charles Milligan/Getty)
IF YOU’RE feeling sleepy, it might be thanks to your astrocytes. This group of brain cells, long assumed to play a mere housekeeping role, may actually be responsible for controlling when we fall asleep, by releasing a chemical called adenosine.
“One of the leading theories of sleep generation comes from the observation that there is an accumulation of adenosine [in the brain] during waking, and that this adenosine decreases during subsequent sleep,” says at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa. Adenosine is thought to suppress neurons which…
