So last weekend, the ultimate frisbee team went on our annual trip to Las Vegas (awesome, as always). Of course we do whatever we can to keep fees down, so we cram about 8 people into a hotel room made for 2.
Saturday night I was so tired after a day of ultimate that I went to bed early. The next morning, someone told me a funny story: apparently I was snoring later in the night, and somebody in the room said "Jimmy, cut it out," and I stopped immediately. Huh, what?
As a Sleep and Dreams student, this confused me greatly. The brainwave patterns of sleepers are significantly different from those of people who are awake, and although this may not change something basic like language processing, it should perhaps distort how I interpret the stimulus, if at all. Heck, even most definitions of sleep that Dr. Dement gave in class included an element of sensory separation from the outside world.
A quick dictionary search confirms: (n) sleep, a natural and periodic state of rest during which consciousness of the world is suspended. Was my consciousness of the world suspended, though, if I was able to hear and respond to the comment despite being asleep?
According to a 1999 study by the University of Ottawa, stimuli introduced during sleep cause varying levels of mental activity based on the phase of sleep during which they are presented. Perhaps the most interesting result here, however, was that a stimulus loud enough to arouse a reaction from a waking subject was also sufficient to cause a reaction in a subject in REM sleep. Although the brain shows some effect when presented with a sound stimulus in all stages of sleep, it seems that the brain is especially receptive during REM sleep. Perhaps one can deduce, then, that I may have been in a particularly receptive REM sleep cycle when I was told to "cut it out."
The field of research regarding how much new sensory information is actually processed during sleep seems fairly small. The concept of listening to a tape during your sleep and waking up with a head full of new knowledge seems like nothing more than a myth. My anecdote, however, reveals the potential for some level of truth behind these assertions - that, to some extent, the brain can be receptive and responsive to sensory stimuli even during sleep.
Sources:
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=sleep
http://www.websciences.org/cftemplate/NAPS/archives/indiv.cfm?ID=19992163
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4 comments:
It doesn't seem weird to me that you'd be able to hear stuff in your sleep. After all, that's why you wake up when you hear loud music, right? It's not like your ears shut off
I agree that sleep and hearing/responding to ouside events is normal, especially in REM sleep. A personal anecdote is that sometimes when I'm dreaming I'll incorporate outside noises (like an alarm going off) into my dreams as a bomb about to go off, for example.
But hearing something and then responding appropriately seems unusual- especially given what he says about brainwave patterns, and responding to stimuli in REM sleep where you're busy dreaming.
Have either you or Ed ever woken up and said a few (mostly) coherent words to someone still awake? My roommates and I did that a handful of times when I was an undergrad. Highly amusing, and luckily not incriminating...
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