ISTOCK PHOTO, MARTINWIMMERThe human brain may wind down when asleep, but it doesn’t lose all responsiveness. Researchers from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and their colleagues recently used electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor the brains of volunteers listening to recordings of spoken words, which they were asked to classify as either objects or animals. Participants were able to classify words during light non-REM (NREM) sleep, but not during either deep NREM sleep or REM sleep, according to a study published today (June 14) in The Journal of Neuroscience.
“With an elegant experimental design and sophisticated analyses of neural activity, [the authors] demonstrate the extent to which the sleeping brain is able to process sensory information, depending on sleep depth [or] stage,” Thomas Schreiner of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email to The Scientist.
During sleep, the brain is thought to block out external stimuli through a gating mechanism at the level of the thalamus. But experiments dating back to the 1960s have shown that certain types of stimuli, such as hearing one’s name, can filter through and trigger awakening. However, the mechanisms that allow the brain to selectively take in information during sleep remain unknown.
“When we fall asleep, it’s pretty similar ...
