ADHD Adults Show More Sleep‑Like Brain Bursts During Tasks
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- Elaine Pinggal and her Monash University team investigated brief sleep‑like brain activity during wakefulness in adults with ADHD.
- 32 ADHD adults off medication experienced more frequent sleep‑like episodes than 31 neurotypical adults while performing a sustained attention task.
- Sleep‑like episodes in the ADHD group were linked to more attention lapses, slower reaction times, and greater feelings of sleepiness.
- The authors suggest that such sleep‑like activity is a normal response to demanding tasks but occurs more often in ADHD brains.
- Auditory stimulation that enhances slow‑wave activity during sleep is proposed as a potential method to reduce daytime sleep‑like activity in ADHD.
- The study appears in The Journal of Neuroscience (2026) and includes a multi‑author team led by Pinggal.
Why it matters: Identifying frequent sleep‑like brain bursts as a neural signature of ADHD clarifies why affected adults make more errors and feel sleepy during demanding tasks, giving clinicians a concrete target for diagnostic assessment and a basis for exploring auditory‑stimulation therapies to improve attention.
