Sleep

Consciousness
• The awareness of the sensations, thoughts, and feelings
being experienced at a given moment.
• Our subjective understanding of both the environment
around us
and our private internal world, unobservable to outsiders.
• In waking consciousness, we are awake and
aware of our
thoughts, emotions, and perceptions.
• All other states of consciousness are considered
altered states of consciousness.
Among these, sleeping and dreaming occur naturally.
Sleep
• sleep is a time of tranquility when we set aside the tensions of the
day and spend the night in uneventful slumber.
• However, a closer look at sleep shows that a good deal of activity occurs
throughout the night.
• Measures of electrical activity in the brain show that the brain is quite
active during the night.
• People progress through a series of distinct stages of sleep during a
night’s rest— stage 1 through stage 4 & REM sleep—
• It takes 90 minutes to move through the stages in cycles.
• Each of these sleep stages is associated with a unique pattern of brain
waves.
Stage 1 sleep
• Relatively rapid, low-amplitude brain waves.
• This is actually a stage of transition between wakefulness and sleep and
lasts only a few minutes.
• It’s easy to wake someone up during this sleep stage, but if a person
isn’t disturbed, they can move quickly into stage 2.
• During Sage 1 sleep, the body has not fully relaxed, though the body
and brain activities start to slow with periods of brief movements.
• There are light changes in brain activity associated with falling asleep in
this stage.
• As sleep becomes deeper, people enter stage 2 sleep, which makes up
about half of the total sleep and is characterized by a slower, more
regular wave pattern.
Stage 1 sleep
• It is easy to wake someone up during this sleep stage, but if a person is
not disturbed, they can move quickly into stage 2.
• As the night unfolds, an uninterrupted sleeper may not spend much
more time in stage 1 as they move through further sleep cycles.
2nd Phase
• During stage 2, the body enters a more subdued state
• Including a drop in temperature, relaxed muscles, and slowed
breathing and heart rate.
• At the same time, brain waves show a new pattern and eye
movement stops.
• On the whole, brain activity slows, but there are short bursts
of brain wave that actually help resist being woken up by
external stimuli.
• Stage 2 sleep can last for 10-25 minutes in each sleep cycle.
3rd phase
• Stage 3 sleep is also known as deep sleep, and it is harder to wake
someone up if they are in this phase.
• Muscle tone, pulse, and breathing rate decrease in N3 sleep as the
body relaxes even further.
• The brain activity pattern during this period looks like delta
wave. So this phase of sleep is also called slow-wave sleep (swp).
• This stage of sleep in important for health: growth & healing.
• Memory restoration & creativity.
• During the early sleep cycle this stage lasts 20-40 minutes. This
stage reduces on the later part of the night.
4th phase
• By the time sleepers arrive at stage 4 sleep, the pattern is even
slower and more regular, and people are least responsive to
outside stimulation
• Stage 4 sleep is most likely to occur during the early part of the
night. In the first half of the night, sleep is dominated by stages 3
and 4.
Sleep Cycle
 REM sleep
• Several times a night, when sleepers have cycled back to a shallower
state of sleep, something curious happens.
• Their heart rate increases and becomes irregular, their
blood pressure rises, and their breathing rate increases.
• Main characteristic of this period is the back-and-forth movement of their
eyes, as if they were watching an action-filled movie. This period of sleep
is called rapid eye movement, or REM sleep.
• REM sleep is known for the most vivid dreams.
• Dreams can occur in any sleep stage, but they are less common and
intense in the NREM periods.
EEG during sleep
 Issues affect the stages of sleep
● Age: Time in each stage changes dramatically over a person’s life. Newborns

spend far more time in REM sleep and may enter a REM stage as soon as they

fall asleep. As they get older, their sleep becomes similar to that of adults. Older

adults tend to spend less time in REM sleep.

● As individuals age, the proportion of slow-wave sleep decreases, which is thought

to contribute to the memory decline often observed in older adults.
● Recent sleep patterns: If a person gets irregular or insufficient sleep over a

period of days or more, it can cause an abnormal sleep cycle.

●
 Issues affect the stages of sleep

● Alcohol: Alcohol and some other drugs can alter sleep architecture. For example,

alcohol decreases REM sleep early in the night, but as the alcohol wears off,

there is a REM sleep rebound, with prolonged REM stages.

● Sleep disorders: Sleep apnea, restless legs syndrome (RLS), and other

conditions that cause multiple awakenings may interrupt a healthy sleep cycle.
Issues with sleep
False claim: Researchers in sleep laboratories have found that some
people who report being up all night actually fall asleep in 30 minutes
and stay asleep all night.
• Insomnia: Furthermore, some people with insomnia accurately recall
sounds that they heard while they were asleep, which gives them the
impression that they were awake during the night.
• Insomnia: Most common issue in population. Specially women and
older person suffer from it time to time.
• Sleep Apnea: Person has difficulty breathing while sleeping. The
person
is constantly reawakened when the lack of oxygen becomes great
enough to trigger a waking response.
 Issues with sleep
Sleep Apnea: Disturbed sleep results in extreme fatigue the next day.
• Sleep apnea also may play a role in sudden infant death syndrome
(SIDS).
• Night terrors: Sudden awakenings from non-REM sleep with extreme
fear, panic, and strong physiological arousal.
• Usually occurring in stage 4 sleep, night terrors may be so frightening
that a sleeper awakens with a shriek.
• They are far less frequent than nightmares, & they typically occur
during slow-wave, non-REM sleep.
• They occur most frequently in children between the ages of 3 and 8
 Issues with sleep
• Narcolepsy is uncontrollable sleeping that occurs for short periods
while a person is awake.
• No matter what the activity-a narcoleptic will suddenly fall asleep.
• The causes of narcolepsy are not mostly known.
• But Narcolepsy is often caused by the loss of orexin-producing
neurons in the brain, which play a crucial role in regulating
wakefulness and sleep.
• Could be a genetic component, because narcolepsy runs in families.
• Polysomnography (sleep study) can identify it.
• Individuals with narcolepsy may experience vivid, often disturbing
dreams and muscle paralysis as they enter REM sleep, a phenomenon
known as sleep paralysis.
 Issues with sleep
Sleep-talking and Sleep-walking Both occur during stage 3 sleep and are
more common in children than in adults.
Sleep talking usually involves incoherent speech
It is typically harmless but may disrupt the sleep of others.
• Sleep-talkers and sleepwalkers usually have a vague consciousness of
the world around them, and a sleepwalker may be able to walk with
agility around obstructions in a crowded room.
• But Sleepwalkers are at risk of physical injury due to their lack of
awareness of their surroundings and the possibility of stumbling or
falling during an episode.
 Issues with sleep
Sleep-talking and Sleep-walking
• Sleepwalking episodes can be triggered by various factors, including
stress, lack of sleep, medications, or sleep disorders.
• Sleepwalking is most common in children, especially between the ages
of 4 and 8, although it can occur in people of any age.
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) may be used to address underlying
psychological issues that contribute to sleepwalking, especially when
episodes are frequent or severe.
 What are circadian rhythms?

● Circadian rhythms are physical, mental, and behavioral changes

that follow a 24-hour cycle.

● These natural processes respond primarily to light and dark and

affect most living things, including animals, plants, and microbes.

● Circadian rhythms have an important purpose: they prepare your

body for expected changes in the environment and, for example,
the time for activity, time for sleep, and times to eat.
 What are circadian rhythms?
● External cues are important; the strongest is the sun’s light/dark cycle.
Artificial light also influences the pacemaker.

● Circadian rhythms need time to adjust to new sleep times, so changing

work times can be difficult.

● In general, if people have to change their sleep times (for example, for
work or travel), they tend to have more difficulties getting up earlier
and have an easier time getting up later. This is because the circadian
pacemaker tends to run longer than 24 hours, which makes it easier to
sleep later in the morning and go to bed later.
 The Role of Sleep in Memory & Thinking
• Memory consolidation occurs during sleep
• While we’re awake, our brains store information from our
experiences throughout the day in the hippocampus region.
• The hippocampus replays the day's experiences during
slow-wave sleep, facilitating memory consolidation.
• But for long term storage, those memories need to be relocated
to the cortex- where connections are made between the new
information and what we already know.
• This process helps us to make better sense of the new information
& to retain it.
• This may be facilitated by sleep.
 The Role of Sleep in Memory & Thinking
• Study 1: (Verleger et al., 2008)
• Participants memorized a long list of word pairs immediately
before they went to sleep.
• As soon as they reached the deepest stages of sleep, researchers
used electrodes to stimulate very slow brain waves in some of the
participants.
• The participants whose brain waves were altered in this way
showed better recall for the word in next morning.
• The researchers theorize that these slow brain waves improved
memory storage by strengthening the connections between
neurons
 The Role of Sleep in Memory & Thinking
• Study 2: (Stickgold & Wehrwein, 2009; Yordanova et al., 2008)
• Researchers gave a set of 7 puzzle which has a trick
• 2nd puzzle is the ultimate answer, even if they had to go through
and solve 7 puzzle to get final answer.
• Participants who solved the first puzzle set before sleep, they took
less time to solve the next puzzle. They solved the puzzle time
times sooner than the other group (who didn’t sleep in between).
• Conclusion : Altogether, these relevant findings suggest that
sleep plays an important role in helping us to analyze and make
meaning of our waking experiences.
 What happens for sleep deprivation?
• People who participated in sleep deprivation study- felt weary
and irritable
• Couldn’t concentrate, and show a loss of creativity, even after
only minor deprivation.
• They also show a decline in logical reasoning ability.
• Most people do not suffer from any permanent consequences of
such temporary sleep deprivation.
• But lack of sleep can make us feel edgy, slow our reaction time,
and lower our performance on academic and physical tasks.
• In addition, we put ourselves, and others, at risk when we carry
out routine activities, such as driving.
 What happens for sleep deprivation?

Highly activated amygdala

when people did not sleep
adequately

participants responded more emotionally when they had less sleep

 neuroscience explanations of dream
• ACTIVATION-SYNTHESIS THEORY
• Focuses on the random electrical energy that the brain produces
during REM sleep.
• This electrical energy randomly stimulates memories stored in
the brain.
• Because we have a need to make sense of our world even while
asleep, the brain takes these chaotic memories and weaves them
into
a logical story line, filling in the gaps to produce a rational
scenario.