Study Shows How Effectively Brain Responds To Risk While Sleeping

According to a new study, brain apparently appear to manage a lot of work and additionally it also monitor the the risk that can cause due to stranger even when people are sleeping. Our busy brains keep trying to keep us alive even when we sleep. They keep track of our heartbeats and respiration, clean up the trash people had amassed over the day, and sort and file our memories.

University of Salzburg cognitive neuroscientist Manuel Schabus said that unfamiliar and unknown voices should not be chatting to anyone in the middle of the night can set off an alarm. This brain warning was seen in 17 subjects. Volunteers performed polysomnography to monitor individual brain waves, oxygen levels, heart and breathing rates, and movements after a night to acclimate to the novel circumstances of the sleep lab.

On Twitter, the study's first author and cognitive neuroscientist Mohamed Ameen said that they performed an experiment by giving the participants audio recordings of their own names as well as two unfamiliar names. The names were uttered by either a familiar or an unknown voice. Participants who were exposed to the quietly played, unknown sounds responded more than those who were not. Micro-arousals, which are tiny bursts of wake-like brain activity that last only a few seconds, were among the responses. Micro-arousals are a type of arousal that has yet to be fully understood.

Since both familiar and new voices elicited K-complex brainwave patterns, while particularly those who heard unknown voices reported significant alterations in sensory processing brain activity. K-complexes are supposed to keep you from waking up in response to innocuous noises.

K-complexes may be a major factor in determining how people sleep by assisting the brain in deciding whether people should sleep or wake up. It's a clever mechanism that allows people to filter what's essential or not, and when it is, it will start a series of events that will help you assimilate the knowledge without waking you up and disrupting your sleep. These studies showed that sleeping brain captures crucial sensory information for future processing.

Meanwhile, the researchers haven't ruled out the possibility that this heightened response is due to new voices getting greater attention in general, rather than being viewed as a potential threat.

However, the brain's response to new voices changed with repeated exposure later in sleep, although the response to familiar voices did not. This shows that during sleep, the brains not only processed but also absorbed new information, presumably deciding that the strange but recurrent noise was not a threat and thereby dulling future reactions to it. These observations may explain why it's difficult to sleep in new places at first: our brains need time to filter out all the unfamiliar sounds and evaluate whether people are safe to stay blissfully ignorant.