You May Still Be Asleep
“’This paper clearly confirms the suspicion that sleep can occur in parts of the brain when the rest of the brain is awake — that’s what we see in the clinic,’ says Mark Mahowald, director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis. Sleepwalking is the best example of how such simultaneous mixtures of wakefulness and sleep can result in complex behaviours, he adds.”
— Nature reports on a study conducted by University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Guilio Tononi
that discovered localized pockets of the sort of slow-wave brain activity previously thought to be absent during waking hours. “Call it a cortical blink,” says David McCormick, a neurobiologist at Yale. “Just a brief shutdown of a piece of cortex that can disrupt neural processing.” Here are, umm, 25 great songs about being asleep or not asleep. (Excuse the excessive collection. I was having trouble falling asleep last night. But the part of my brain responsible for knowing when to stop embedding YouTube videos must have dozed off there for a while.)