Many studies have demonstrated the impairment of sustained attention due to total sleep deprivation (TSD). However, it remains unclear whether and how TSD affects the processing of visual selective attention. In the current study, 24 volunteers performed a visual search task before and after TSD over a period of 36 h while undergoing spontaneous electroencephalography. Paired-sample t-tests of behavioral performance revealed that, compared with baseline values, the participants showed lower accuracy and higher variance in response time in visual search tasks performed after TSD. Analysis of the event-related potentials (ERPs) showed that the mean amplitude of the N2-posterior-contralateral (N2pc) difference wave after TSD was less negative than that at baseline and the mean amplitude of P3 after TSD was more positive than that at baseline. Our findings suggest that TSD significantly attenuates attentional direction/orientation processing and triggers a compensatory effect in the parietal brain to partially offset the impairments. These findings provide new evidence and improve our understanding of the effects of sleep loss.