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
When you fall asleep, parts of your brain turn off or do tasks they normally don’t when you’re awake.
Some parts of your brain remain on for survival. These include a lot of brain near your spine, called the “cerebellum”. They handle automatic tasks like breathing and reflexes (like when you put your hands up to block fast objects near your eyes). Although most of your brain does shut off, the signals for most senses are located near the cerebellum and stay on even in sleep. They can trigger wake-up reflexes if one of your senses is giving unusual signals that don’t appear like normal sleeptime signals.
Some of those reflexes are triggered by noise and they wake you up if a noise meets a checklist that brains have evolved to recognize as *potential danger*. These include loud, sudden noises like thunder, or the voices of other people.
Brains are also very good at filtering out noise. If you have a good memory for dreams, you’ll notice that a lot of loud noises or arguments that don’t seem directly threatening will influence the dream you have. Putting these senses *inside* the dream seems to suppress wake-up reflexes, but I’m not too familiar with why that would be. Some people even hallucinate hearing people talking while falling asleep, which is probably when the brain starts to turn dreams on.
While asleep, the brain doesn’t need to have details about lectures or how your blankets feel. So it filters that data out and continues to rest.
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