By Will Ferguson,College of Arts and SciencesPULLMAN, Wash. – Washington State University researchers have discovered a genetic variation that predicts how well people perform certain mental tasks when they are sleep-deprived.
Their research shows that individuals with a specific variation of the DRD2 gene are resilient to the effects of sleep deprivation when completing tasks that require cognitive flexibility, or the ability to develop appropriate decisions based on changing information.
Sleep-deprived people with two other variations of the gene tend to perform much more poorly on the same kinds of tasks,the researchers found.
The DRD2 dopamine receptor gene influences the processing of information ... » More ...
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Source: wsu.edu