The little sleep

• Autores: Jessa Gamble
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2902, 2013, págs. 34-37
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Gamble examines how people sleep. During sleep, complex changes occur in the brain. Some of these can be observed with an electroencephalograph, which uses electrodes placed on the skull to track the brain's electrical activity. One's nightly 8 hours are not a single undifferentiated lump, but instead multiple cycles of four stages. People go through these sequentially; during a good night's sleep, they'll repeat each roughly 90-minute cycle five or six times. Some of the stages have especially strong associations with specific functions. Stage 1 is considered the boundary between sleep and wakefulness. Its length varies from person to person and throughout the night, but it tends to lasts between 5 and 15 minutes, and its primary function appears to be to get one to the deeper stages.