This concept has always baffled me.
Any help understanding this would be greatly appreciated!
In: Biology
Stage 1 is pretty light, during one study people were “woken up” when people’s brains started to show that patterns for stage 1 and the participants would say they hadn’t been asleep!!! If someone had insomnia this happened more often. So good news for people with insomnia you might actually be asleep when you think you are awake.
Because there isn’t one.
Sleep isn’t a binary process, rather there are different levels. You ever get woken up just as you were starting to fall asleep, and realise you kind of were already asleep? That’s because you were just in a very light form of sleep where it’s hard to distinguish between being asleep and being awake.
It’s kind of like how you can’t tell an exact moment between not feeling hungry, and feeling hungry.
This is because your body goes through a series of transitions as you start falling asleep. Muscles relax to the point where you should be unable to move them at one point, breathing slows, body temperature decreases and your brain goes through some transitions as well. Changes are, amongst others, how we process memory and thoughts.
For you to remember the act of falling asleep, you would need to tell your brain to help you retain full consciousness til the very last second, only then would you be able to perceive the change of consciousness itself, but since it is a process, your ability to remember you falling asleep to the second is, unfortunately impossible.
You can, for at least part of the process, I listen to audiobooks at night and on a few occasions when nodding off i hear the audiobook turn into nonsense noises that wakes me back up.
I had it happen to me once. I was lying on my back and It felt like my consciousness was being pulled down into water. It was midday and all sound got muffled and farther away. All my physical feelings fell further away and it scared me awake. It would be hard to sleep if that shit happened regularly.
If you wanted to tell the exact moment you would have to be fully conscious, then you wouldn’t be sleeping.
The same reason we can’t tell the exact moment we died. Our consciousness changes the moment we fall asleep.
Simple really can you use your phone while it’s powering down? Nope, usually not because everything that you need to have powered on to use the phone is being turned off same with talking everything your body uses to talk is powered off.
It’s more that we never remember it afterwards. The memory parts of the brain “turn off” before you have completely lost conciousness. So basically, none of us remember the time leading up to us falling asleep.
I think about this a lot. One minute I’m trying to fall asleep and think it’ll never happen then boom it happens and I didnt even realize. I wish we could just turn sleeping on and off at will
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