Most of us are intimately familiar with self-induced sleep deprivation. We're not proud of it, but we've all pulled all-nighters at least half a dozen times in our lives, for the most varied reasons imaginable. Whether it was exam fever, a project that had to be finished by the following morning or a restless baby that simply didn't seem to want to settle down, we've all had to stay up all night and deal with the after-effects the following day.

We've all said to ourselves that one night won't do too much damage, as long as we went to bed early the following evening. However, that's not exactly the case. A recent study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and published in the Journal of Neuroscience indicated that losing just one night's sleep can cause our brains to temporarily shut down.

"Imagine you are sitting in a room watching a movie with the lights on. In a stable brain, the lights stay on all the time. In a sleepy brain, the lights suddenly go off", explained David Dinges, who was part of the research team. "It's as though it is both asleep and awake and they are switching between each other very rapidly", he added.

The study was conducted using a type of brain imaging known as fMRI - or functional magnetic resonance imaging - which monitors and measures the blood flow in the brain. The fMRI indicated the occurrence of lapses in several areas of the brain which didn't perform properly when people were sleep deprived and functioned perfectly when the same people were well rested.

The study thus showed that sleep-deprived brains alternate between periods of near-normal brain function and extremely serious lapses in visual processing and attention. The conclusion is that being deprived of sleep for just one night renders the brain unstable and prevents us from performing even the simplest tasks. Which means that we should all avoid not getting any sleep at all during the night, even if we're in bed for just two or three hours.