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Researchers at the Giga-Center of Research Cyclotron at the University of Liège found that the body reacts to the outside world while sleeping, which explains how sensory input can alter sleep quality.
Researchers at Ulysses have teamed up with the University of Friborg in Switzerland to investigate whether the body actually disconnects from the outside world during sleep. To do this, they focused on how heart rate changes when we listen to different words during sleep. They found that relaxing words slowed cardiovascular activity as a reflection of deep sleep and compared to neutral words that did not have such a slowing effect. The discovery is presented in the Journal of Sleep Research and sheds new light on brain-heart interactions during sleep.
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Matthew Koroma (Fund for Scientific Research – FNRS postdoctoral researcher), Christina Schmidt and Athena Demertzi (both Fund for Scientific Research – FNRS Research Associate) from the GIGA Cyclotron Research Center in Ulises joined colleagues from the University of Friborg to lead the previous study. Worked together with. Analysis of brain data (electroencephalogram) shows that comforting words increase deep sleep duration and sleep quality, which suggests that we can positively influence sleep by using meaningful words. By that time, the authors had speculated that the brain was also able to interpret sensory information in a way that made our bodies more relaxed after hearing soothing words during sleep. In this new study, the authors had the opportunity to analyze heart activity (electrocardiogram) to test this hypothesis and found that the heart slowed its activity only after the presentation of relaxing, but not control words. Is.
Markers of both heart and brain activity were then compared to determine how much they contributed to the modulation of sleep by auditory information. In fact cardiovascular activity has been proposed to contribute directly to the way we see the world, but such evidence had until recently received awareness. With these results, the Ulysses researchers showed that this was also true in sleep, offering a new perspective on the essential role of physiological responses beyond brain data to our understanding of sleep.
“Most research on sleep focuses on the brain and rarely examines physical activity,” says Dr. Schmidt.
“We nevertheless hypothesize that the brain and body are connected even when we cannot fully communicate, including during sleep. For a full understanding of how we think and respond to our environment Information from both the brain and the body must be taken into account”, explains. Dr. Demertzi.
Dr. Koroma advocated, “We shared our methodology freely, following the principles of open science, in the hope that the tools that helped make this discovery will help other sleep researchers.” “will inspire us to study the role played by the heart in other functions.”
This work provides a more comprehensive view of the modulation of sleep functions by sensory information. For example, by looking at cardiovascular responses to sounds, we could in the future study how sounds affect the emotional processing of memories during sleep.
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