Your muscles relax, causing unintentional muscular movements in some people and the impression of falling off the bed. While your brain emitted at first alpha waves, which appear as soon as you close your eyes, it slips to waves of lower amplitude and lower frequency, theta waves. You fall asleep and this stage, stage N1, typically lasts about ten minutes. You begin the transition between the waking state and light sleep. Comfortably lying in your bed, eyes closed, you begin to relax. We dug into our database of night recordings to illustrate these different stages of sleep. According to current conventions established by the American Sleep Association, you typically go through four different sleep stages. Since Berger’s classification, the nomenclature has evolved considerably. So what happens in your brain during the night? It’s a simple graphic representation, the movie of your night so to speak. The sequence of these different stages during the night can then be represented by a hypnogram. This multiple recording, polysomnography, is annotated by hand by expert sleep technicians to identify the different stages. Sensors placed on the surface of the skin detect eye movements (electro-oculography, EOG) and muscle tone (electromyography, EMG) in addition to the most important kernel - our brain activity (EEG). But to determine more precisely sleep’s stages, physicians now follow several physiological parameters at once. They are characteristic of the state of your brain when you are awake but at rest, with your eyes closed.Īlmost 100 years later, these signals are still in use. The most well-known are undoubtedly the alpha waves. Berger then described the different stages of sleep according to the shape of the recorded waves. Based on these records, which he called electroencephalogram (EEG), he showed that the cerebral activity varies in frequency and amplitude according to the different states of wakefulness and sleep. He then developed a system of sensors placed on the scalp to record this signal. It’s like a lighthouse guiding sailing boats. In the 1920s he discovered that our brain cells, neurons, are activated in a rhythmic way. Hans Berger, a German researcher, is one of the pioneers in this exploration of brain activity. We’ve also thrown in a dash of historical context for good measure. Today we take a deep-dive into the science of sleep stages, their associated benefits and a little debunking a long the way. To better understand sleep, we need to understand what happens in our brain and body when we sleep. The different sleep stages, their functions, sleep’s clear benefits. We spend about a third of our lives sleeping.
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