The Ninja Brain: Humans Can Prioritise Meaningful Sounds Even While Asleep

By Matthew Warren We often think of sleep as a chance to switch off from the outside world, leaving us blissfully ignorant of anything going on around us. But neuroscience research has shown this is a fantasy – we still monitor the environment and respond to particular sounds while we’re sleeping (at least in some stages of sleep) – a fact that will be unsurprising to anyone who has woken up after hearing someone say their name. Now a study published in Nature Human Behaviour has revealed more about the brain’s surprisingly sophisticated levels of engagement with the outside world during sleep. Not only does the sleeping brain respond to certain words or sounds – it can even select between competing signals, prioritising the one that is more informative. For obvious reasons it’s a challenge for researchers to figure out what people are paying attention to while they’re asleep. Guillaume Legendre at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and his colleagues overcame this problem by looking at the changing patterns of their volunteers’ brainwaves using EEG (electroencephalography, which uses scalp electrodes to record the brain’s electrical activity). The team recruited 24 French participants to complete a series of listening tasks while awake and asleep. In the initial part of the experiment, the team recorded the participants’ EEG signal while they listened to one-minute-long excerpts of speech. Some of these excerpts were taken from real news reports, s...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cognition Perception Sleep and dreaming Source Type: blogs