A new study shows how sleep deprivation can affect the human brain, and may even give fatigued people a false sense of how alert they really are.

The new research from Singapore used functional MRI’s to compare brain activity between sleep-deprived and well-rested people.

Those who'd gone without sleep had periods of near normal behavior; however, those times were interspersed with severe drops in attention and visual processing.

Researchers likened those quick drops in attention to a power failure.

Experts say this illustrates why sleep deprivation could be so dangerous.

They say those periods of relative alert behavior may give a false sense of competency… when the brain could lose power at any moment.

In other medical news…

Binge drinking and college students: the two often go hand-in-hand.

And new research indicates many students celebrate their 21st birthdays with a dangerous drinking ritual.

Over 2,500 current and former college students participated in an online survey conducted by researchers at the University of Missouri.

34% of men and 24% of women said they had 21 shots of alcohol on their twenty-first birthday.

Some drank even more than that.

Four out of five participants said alcohol was involved in their birthday celebration.

Researchers estimate over half of the men and more than a third of the women had blood alcohol levels of .26 and higher.