AISHILA KAR, AMITY UNIVERSITY KOLKATA
Scientists have long believed but couldn’t make sure that brain activity declines once we sleep. Most sleep research is conducted using electroencephalography, a technique that entails measuring brain activity via electrodes put down along a patient’s scalp. But, an assistant at EPFL’s Medical Image Processing Laboratory, Anjali Tarun, decided to examine brain activity through sleep using resonance imaging, or MRI.
The only thing was that it was not easy to perform brain MRIs on patients when they were sleeping. The machines are very noisy, making it hard for participants to succeed in a state of deep sleep. But working with Prof. Nikolai Axmacher at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Prof. Sophie Schwartz at the University of Geneva, Tarun could support simultaneous MRI and EEG data from moreover thirty people. “Two hours may be an almost long time, meaning we were able to obtain a collection of rare, reliable data,” says Tarun. “MRIs perform while a patient is performing a cognitive task normally last around 10-30 minutes.”
After checking and comparing all the information, what Tarun found was surprising. They calculated precisely what percentage times networks made from distinct parts of the brain became active during per stage of sleep. They discovered that in light phases of sleep — that’s, between after you go to sleep and once you enter a state of deep sleep — overall brain activity decreases. During the transition phase to deep sleep from sleep, local brain activity increased and mutual interaction reduced. This means the shortcoming of brain networks to synchronize.
Tarun said that “our findings reveal that consciousness is that the results of interactions between distinct brain regions, but not in localized brain activity”. After studying how our state of consciousness is altered during different stages of sleep, and what meaning in terms of brain network activity, we will better understand and account for the big selection of brain functions that characterize us as human beings.
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SOURCE- “NREM sleep stages specifically alter dynamical integration of large-scale brain networks” by Anjali Tarun, Danyal Wainstein-Andriano, Virginie Sterpenich, Laurence Bayer, Lampros Perogamvros, Mark Solms, Nikolai Axmacher, Sophie Schwartz and Dimitri Van De Ville, 22 January 2021, iScience.
DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2020.101923 https://scitechdaily.com/magnetic-resonance-imaging-helps-unravel-the-mysteries-of-sleep/
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