Some people wake up at the drop of a pin; others snooze through their alarms every morning. Whether you can sleep through noise has a lot to do with the brain waves you produce while you sleep, according to a new study published in Current Biology. And good news for insomniacs: it might one day be possible to manipulate these waves to ensure a good night’s rest.
Previous research has shown that when people sleep, the thalamus—a brain structure that connects the high-level thought areas with the sights and sounds of the outside world—produces brief, high-frequency brain waves called spindles. Scientists speculated that these spindles shut out environmental sounds during sleep. To find out, Jeffrey Ellenbogen, chief of the division of sleep medicine at Harvard University’s Massachusetts General Hospital, and his colleagues asked 12 healthy people to spend three nights in his sleep lab. The first night the researchers measured spindle activity while the subjects slept individually in quiet rooms. The second and third nights the researchers relentlessly bombarded each snoozing participant with recordings of common noises such as toilets flushing, phones ringing and people talking, starting each noise at a low volume and repeating it more and more loudly until the subject was aroused from sleep. Then they repeated the process as soon as the person fell asleep again.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Things That Go Bump in the Night: Scientific American
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