Parts of your brain can be asleep while you're awake

OK, full disclosure, the study was done on rats, but they observed that parts of the rat's brain could be asleep while the rat appeared conscious. However in tasks involving the sleeping part of the brain, the otherwise awake rats usually failed.

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Some parts of a rat’s brain can fall asleep even while the animal plays and seems wide awake, a new study shows.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and their colleagues in Italy kept rats up four hours past the rodents’ usual bedtime. Even though the rats stayed awake, electrodes implanted in their brains showed that some brain cells went to sleep while neighboring ones remained active, the team reports in the April 28 Nature.

Rats with sleeping neurons were also prone to making mistakes during slightly difficult tasks, a finding that may have implications for sleep-deprived people.

“And it would be very insidious because nobody would be able to tell there was anything wrong with you,” says Giulio Tononi, the University of Wisconsin neuroscientist who led the work. The rats in the study weren’t “staring off into the void or anything,” he says.

The findings add to a growing body of evidence that sleep doesn’t necessarily involve the whole brain at one time. Many scientists previously thought that a central control center determined when the brain sleeps and wakes. But researchers have been building a case for the past two decades that sleep may originate in single cells and eventually spread all over the brain.

[Easy Rhino]

I guess it's bedtime for me then!

[micropage7]

interesting, how we never realize that it sleep for a while when we are wake up

[LifeOnMars]

Isn't this related to "Deja Vu" or did I already say that?

[slyfox2151]

Originally Posted by LifeOnMars

Isn't this related to "Deja Vu" or did I already say that?

no its not related at all.

[Funtoss]

how can this beeee!!!? lol does this relate to zombies as well? if it does then i think my partner is a zombie.. *hope she doesnt read this :L

[LifeOnMars]

Originally Posted by slyfox2151

no its not related at all.

That's wonderful, thank you.

[tpupokey]

This isn't really new though is it? It's long been known that, for example, dolphins switch off parts of their brains in sequence in order to get sleep while remaining active (they in essence never really have to sleep).

I wouldn't be at all surprised if this translated to humans in part at least.