Research Hit: Different Parts of Your Brain Take “Micro Naps” at Different Times

A new big data analysis of sleeping and waking brain patterns reveals that different parts of the brain wake and sleep — sometimes at very short intervals

Are we talking of taking naps during the day?

No, we’re actually talking about much smaller time limits — as in milliseconds.

But the brain can’t sleep for milliseconds surely!

Well, this is precisely what this piece of research has found out. This massive study out of the University of California by David Parkes at al. analyzed Petabytes of data (that’s a lot!) from brain scanning research with machine learning tools to try to identify more precise patterns of how the brain responds while awake and while asleep. And the surprise is that different regions of the brain are sometimes doing different things at different time scales.

So you are saying that we’re sometimes sleeping when we’re awake, and when we’re asleep we’re sometimes awake??

Yes, but this shows a much more nuanced picture. Note that we can’t relate this to states of fatigue but this will likely contribute to this.