Do you ever do something you don't remember? Or do you remember something that you didn't do?

1. Why your brain may "fall asleep" when you keep your
eyes open
A new understanding of sleep can explain why the mind gets distracted.
The classic idea of ​
​
dreams is that it is not a phenomenon at all. If someone answers,
they wake up. If they are not awake, they are in Snooze Town.
What we observe in the brain reinforces this concept. Tests that detect electrical
activity show that this activity looks different during wakefulness and sleep, especially

2. during deep sleep. Slow-wave activity is most common in our deepest sleep moments,
which is a neuronal rhythm related to the consolidation of memory and learning.
But this vision of one of the most important parts of life is changing. Recent studies
have shown that no matter from a behavioral point of view, whether a person is awake
or asleep, various parts of the brain may be indifferent to sleep states.
This idea applies to an emerging concept: the "partial sleep" phenomenon, which
Thomas Andrillon and his colleagues explored in a study published recently in the
journal Nature Communications.
During partial sleep, the brain of a person whose skull keeps the brain awake will
show slow-wave signals that are seen in deep sleep. This study shows that slow
waves during wakefulness can predict when the brain becomes distracted or goes
blank.
This also means that the relationship between sleep and consciousness is more
tangled than previously thought.
"From the perspective of the brain, sleep is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon,"
Andrillon, a researcher at the Paris Brain Institute and Monash University, told.
"In particular, sometimes different parts of the brain may be in different states of
wakefulness or sleep. Therefore, the boundary between wakefulness and sleep is
much more flexible than previously thought."
When your mind is blank, it means you are awake but feeling empty; your stream of
consciousness has stopped. At the same time, distraction is when your attention is
shifted to ideas that are not related to the task at hand, such as when you are arguing
early in the day and thinking about what you should say when you respond to emails
at night.
Andrillon said that daydreaming is a way of distracting, but it is also "completely
different." Daydreaming is more complicated than most mental disturbances, and your

3. neural mechanisms may be completely different. He should know: "I often daydream,
and maybe too often."
Andrillon’s academic interest in daydreaming and distraction is based on long-standing
questions, such as: Why do we spend so much time without paying attention to our
surroundings? What happens to the brain at these moments?
To determine the answers to these and more questions, Andrillon and his colleagues
recruited 26 people and recorded all the electrical activity in the brain when they
completed nearly two hours of boring tasks. Every 30 to 70 seconds, the researchers
interrupted the participants and asked whether their mental state was wandering,
unstable, or focused on the task, and how tired they were.
Andrillon explained that the idea here is that, for example, distraction "may be related
to some parts of the brain sleeping and the rest awake," Andrillon said.
Further analysis showed that before they started to wander, slow waves began to
appear in the frontal area of ​
​
the brain. At the same time, if slow waves appear in the
posterior areas of the brain, such as the parietal lobe, there will often be brain blanks
after them.
When these changes occur in the brain, previous studies have shown that they occur
spontaneously, without human knowledge or will.
The research team proposed that these mental states can be explained by
"high-amplitude, low-frequency, sleep-like waves," and the appearance of slow waves
predicts the duration of attention.
Andrillion covers the implications of the findings for a reason. Due to the non-invasive
nature of this study, researchers cannot fully understand the neural activity of a single
brain region. This makes it difficult to tell whether a particular area is really sleeping
and which ones are not.
"What we have is something that looks like a dream, which is a major difference," he
said.

4. Andrillion assumes that partial sleep is an energy-saving function. He said it can be
"equivalent to an" energy saver, "allowing you to" turn off certain parts of your brain so
you can slow down the accumulation of fatigue and save resources for the future. "
In a way, this is why his team is interested in examining ADHD patients' brain activity
during sleep and wakefulness. If you have ADHD, attention problems are often closely
related to sleep problems. Partial sleep can help explain the cause.
Researchers also want to know whether the mechanism that drives slow waves during
wakefulness is the same as that produced during sleep, and they want to establish
methods to predict these changes.
"It's great to see if we can use slow waves to detect mental wandering and lack of
attention in real-time and in a real environment," Andrillion said.
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