In this clamorous modern world, heavy sleepers have an advantage: They can snooze despite noisy neighbors and car alarms, and they’re capable of conking out on a red-eye flight to awake refreshed and smiling.
But how do these sound sleepers do it? According to a neuroscience study published today in Current Biology, they’re blessed with a type of brain activity that may essentially block out noise
The sleepers were then exposed to a steady stream of auditory assaults. Each sound — whether it was a phone ringing, an animated conversation, or a jet engine — would be played quietly at first, and then gradually cranked up until the patients’ brain waves showed a disruption to the sleep pattern. After a few seconds of quiet, the researchers cued up the next sound and the process began again.
he said.
“The mechanism that produces spindles may actually interfere with the transmission of sensory information through the thalamus to the cortex,” said study coauthor Thien Thanh Dang-Vu.
“It raises one of the unanswered questions from our research,” Fogel says. “Do we see these correlations between IQ and memory consolidation because sleep spindles serve a protective function, and those with better quality sleep can learn more easily? Or do spindles also play a more active role in memory consolidation?”
“Although our computer vernacular uses ’sleep’ to refer to a process of temporary shut-down, that’s not the way our brain works,” Ellenbogen wrote in an email to Wired.com. “During sleep, our neurons are busy doing very complicated processing, including, this study shows, generating sleep spindles to protect us from being awoken from noises in the environment.”
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