Dr. Matt Walker

And what we found was that it was the latter.

that you were very abnormally reactive, overreactive to negative events, but you were equally hypersensitive to very reward based stimuli.

And this fits beautifully with what we know from sleep deprivation.

You are much more impulsive.

You are much more reward seeking.

You are much greater in terms of your sensation seeking.

and your addiction potential when you are not getting sufficient sleep is significantly higher.

And sure enough, when we looked in the brain, many of these dopamine-related circuits that you've described before were overactive when you were under-slapped.

And so I bring this back because it relates to your seesaw sort of analogy.

Yes, you can think about the seesaw with sleep deprivation from a sympathetic parasympathetic.

You can also think about it from a positive versus negative valence.

And once again, our hypothesis was that you're just going to slide down into the negative and you're just going to be less responsive to the rewarding positive.

It was the opposite.

You were...

abnormally and excessively sensitive to both of those domains, which you could argue is perhaps the very worst of all adaptive responses.

Absolutely.

As an organism, you don't want to be non-reactive.

Emotions are powerful, and we've spoken about the benefits.

You need to have emotions

to be a functioning human being or organism in the world.