Mental exhaustion and sleepiness may feel similar, but new research suggests they affect the brain differently. A study published in Frontiers in Neuroergonomics found that increasing task difficulty raised mental workload and fatigue while reducing drowsiness and mind wandering. In contrast, restricting sleep increased sleepiness and mind wandering without consistently worsening performance across cognitive tasks. Researchers studied 40 adults in task-difficulty experiments and 27 in sleep-restriction experiments, including participants from high-stakes professions. The findings highlight why monitoring a single indicator may not accurately reflect a person’s cognitive state. The research could help develop better systems to monitor alertness and mental functioning in safety-critical workplaces.
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