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Abstract:
While falling asleep, we lose consciousness and thereby our ability to process, store and respond to environmental stimuli. The traditional concept of sleep onset as a discrete and global event has recently been challenged by evidence for local sleep. Anecdotally, also cognition in the wake-sleep transition undergoes dynamic changes, for example when reading a book while falling asleep and not being able to remember the content of the last pages. With a new paradigm investigating wake-sleep transitions in an EEG-fMRI setting in which participants listen to an audio book and react to tones, I will show how different information processing components become uncoupled while falling asleep. The different cognitive states entail specific oscillatory signatures and functional activity changes in process- relevant regions showing that higher cognitive areas decrease their activity before lower-level processing areas. Based on these results, I will discuss that the view of sleep onset as an all-or-nothing phenomenon should be revised.
