FLICKR, PARKER KNIGHT
The human brain can process information and even direct responses to cues while a person is sleeping, according to a study published last week (September 11) in Current Biology.
Researchers from École Normale Supérieure in Paris first asked awake people to classify words—such as “dog” and “stamp”—as either animals or objects by pushing buttons with their left or right hands. After this task became automatic, the same people were asked to repeat the test with a different list of words as they fell asleep. Electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings of brain activity on each side of their heads showed that sleeping participants still prepared to press the correct buttons, although they could not actually press them, and their response times were slower. A separate experiment that asked ...
