Effects of Total Sleep Deprivation on the First Positive Lyapunov Exponent of the Waking EEG

Sleep deprivation may affect the brain functions such as cognition and consequently, dynamics of the BEG. We examined the effects of sleep deprivation on chaoticity of the EEG. Five volunteers were sleep-deprived over a period of 24 hours They were checked by EEG during two days. thc first day of baseline period and the second day of total sleep deprivation period. EEGs were recorded from 16 channels for nonlinear analysis. We employed a method of minimum embedding dimension to calculate the first positive Lyapunov exponent. Fer limited noisy data, this algorithm was strikingly faster and more accurate than previous ones. Our results show that the sleep deprived volunteers had lower values of the first positive Lyapunov exponent at ten channels (Fp1, F4. F8. T4, T5. C3, C4. P3. P4. O1) compared with the values of baseline periods. These results suggested that sleep deprivation leads to decrease of chaotic activity in brain and impairment of the information processing in the brain. We suggested that nonlinear analysis of the EEG before and after sleep deprivation may offer fruitful perspectives for understanding the role if sleep and the effects of sleep deprivation on the brain function.