Takeaway
Neurobiological consequences for experimental sleep deprivation results should not be considered a stand in for habitual short sleep duration, which does not have a similar association with activation in the human neurobiological reward circuit.
Why this matters
Our understanding of neural reward processing is based on total sleep deprivation studies rather than habitual short sleep (considered a public health epidemic affecting approximately 1/3 of adults) which may not have similar reward processing brain activation patterns.