A study conducted by scientists at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) and the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) has led to an interesting discovery. A small region of our brain shuts down to take microsecond-long naps while we’re awake.
Furthermore, these same areas “blink” awake while we sleep. These new findings may offer critical insights into neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases that are linked to sleep dysregulation.
The most curious thing is that the discovery happened by accident. Scientists were observing how brain waves in a small area of the brain suddenly turn off for just milliseconds when we are awake.
Sleep studies could be improved after recent discoveries (Image: sutadimages/Shutterstock)
Read more:
Until now, sleep and wake states have been defined by general brain wave patterns – alpha, beta and theta waves when we are awake, delta when we are not – so these “flickering” anomalies challenge what we have understood so far about these distinct states.
“It was surprising to us as scientists to discover that different parts of our brain take short naps when the rest of the brain is awake,” says David Haussler, professor of biomolecular engineering at UCSC.
Brain waves found abnormalities
In the four-year study that collected a massive amount of electrophysiological data, scientists recorded brain wave voltages in 10 different regions of the rat brain. Over several months, they tracked the activity of small groups of neurons down to the microsecond. Petabytes of data were then analyzed by an artificial neural network, to pick out patterns and isolate microsecond-long anomalies that human studies had missed.
Discoveries have changed perceptions of what was thought about brain activity (Image: Elif Bayraktar/Shutterstock)
Using machine learning, the scientists zeroed in on millisecond-long snippets of brain activity data and found that fast activity among a few neurons in a region appeared to go against the grain but was still crucial to sleep, which is typically represented by slow delta waves.
And they observed the opposite rate of activity during periods classically defined as wakefulness – which the team called “intermittencies”.
The researchers then tried to see what physical response could be observed during these split-second micro-naps. They were surprised to observe that the rats seemed to “switch off” for a brief period, and during sleep, the animals twitched during these same “swing” moments.
The findings may offer new insights into conditions associated with dysregulated sleep, providing a new target for treating neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases.
