Report: Brain Regions Sleep While You're Awake

Did you know dolphins can sleep half their brain at a time? It's an enviable skill, one that humans, it turns out, can somewhat achieve themselves. According to MIT researchers, the human brain has a mechanism by which small regions of the brain can go to sleep while the rest of the brain is alert and active...meaning you're awake, but you're not all there, so to speak.

According to these neuroscientists, this partial-sleeping is caused by a brain circuit in the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN). That brain structure relays the signal to the thalamus, then to the cortex, and the result are slower brain waves usually found in deep sleep cycles, general anesthesia, and coma. They demonstrated this using optogenetics.

This region-specific slowing or sleeping may be the explanation for why you zone out while exhausted, or why you may find yourself doing something repetitive while tired, only to snap out of it realize that you did something on autopilot.

The TRN is thought to have a function in how the brain goes about storing memories — it uses slow brain waves in different regions of the brain, with information passing through them more easily as a result. It is thought that maybe some regions have the same slower waves in any given moment in order to swap data betwixt themselves.

SOURCE: MIT