In 2015, for example, he and Bradley Voytek, a former doctoral student now on the faculty at UC San Diego, discovered that the amount of high frequency activity increases with age. These waves pop out above a lot of general activity, also called the 1/f, that has typically been dismissed as noise and ignored.īut Knight and his lab have been looking at this “noise” for a decade and found that it contains useful information about the state of the brain. Most sleep research focuses on the synchronized, rhythmic waves that flow through the neural network of the brain, from the slow waves that signal deep sleep, typically in the first few hours of the night, to the higher frequency waves typical of dream sleep. (Image by Janna Lendner et al, CC BY 4.0)ĭisrupted sleep interferes with all of this, increasing the risk of medical, psychiatric and neurological diseases. In white, the time-resolved spectral slope tracks the underlying changes in arousal level. Benevolently servicing our psychological health, sleep recalibrates our emotional brain circuits, allowing us to navigate next-day social and psychological challenges with cool-headed composure.”īrain activity recorded by three frontal scalp EEG electrodes during a night of sleep. Sleep, as Walker wrote in his 2017 book, “Why we Sleep,” “enriches a diversity of functions, including our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions and choices. If we learn a little bit about how they overlap - maybe anesthesia hijacks some sleep pathways - we might be able to improve anesthesia in the long run.” “We often tell our patients that, ‘You will go to sleep now,’ and I was curious how much these two states actually overlap,” said Lendner, a UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow in her fourth year of residency in anesthesiology at the University Medical Center in Tübingen, Germany. That’s the main reason first author Janna Lendner, a medical resident in anesthesiology, initiated the study. The ability to distinguish REM sleep by means of an EEG will allow doctors to monitor people under anesthesia during surgery to explore how narcotic-induced unconsciousness differs from normal sleep - a still-unsettled question. “And if we measure that simple electrical signature, for the first time, we can precisely determine exactly what state of consciousness someone is experiencing - dreaming, wide awake, anesthetized or in deep sleep.” “These new findings show that, buried in the electrical static of the human brain, there is something utterly unique - a simple signature,” said co-author and sleep researcher Matthew Walker, UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience. It is a universal metric of being unconscious,” said Robert Knight, UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience and senior author of a paper describing the research that was published July 28 in the online journal “We really now have a metric that precisely tells you when you are in REM sleep. But EEGs alone can not tell whether a patient is awake or dreaming: Doctors can only distinguish REM sleep by recording rapid eye movement - hence, the name - and muscle tone, since our bodies relax in a general paralysis to prevent us from acting out our dreams. When we dream, our brains are filled with noisy electrical activity that looks nearly identical to that of the awake brain.īut UC Berkeley researchers have pulled a signal out of the noise that uniquely defines dreaming, or REM sleep, potentially making it easier to monitor people with sleep disorders, as well as unconscious coma patients or those under anesthesia.Įach year, hundreds of thousands of people undergo overnight studies to diagnose problems with their sleep, most of them hooked up to an electroencephalogram (EEG) to monitor brain activity as they progress from wakefulness to deep, slow-wave sleep and on into REM sleep. UC Berkeley researchers have pulled a signal out of the noise that uniquely defines dreaming, or REM sleep, potentially making it easier to monitor people with sleep disorders.
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