Why do we wake up when we hear our names?

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Hi,

I just fell asleep in class with the camera off and when the professor called my name to make sure my group was ready to present I immediately woke up to say that I was in the lecture and almost had a heart attack because missing this specific lecture is an automatic fail. I wanted to ask anyone as to why we wake up if someone calls our name even when we’ve been asleep for 10+ minutes, but don’t wake up when hearing other people’s names or the lecture content.

In: Biology

25 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

You can get to the point, if you really work on it, where you can train your brain to listen for specific sounds or words.

I used to be a firefighter and worked at a larger house with 3 trucks and 3 crews. We would rotate every shift, randomly, between which assignment we would get and which truck we were on. Different every day. But when we went to sleep, after a while, I’d only wake up in the middle of the night if my specific truck I was on that shift was called out. Some nights your truck goes a dozen times a night and sometimes not at all. I’d sleep super hard through the calls that didn’t involve the truck I was assigned to that day.

However, now as an ex firefighter, I’ll wake up and run out of my room in the middle of the night if I hear anything that resembled our tones back in the day.

Pretty wild stuff and not too dissimilar to what you’re talking about. The amygdala is a power thing and you can basically train it.

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