We don’t drift off to sleep; we suddenly fall into slumber
DedMityay/Shutterstock
The brain doesn’t gradually fall asleep. Instead, it reaches a tipping point at which it rapidly transitions from wakefulness to sleep in a matter of minutes – a discovery that could improve our understanding and treatment of sleep disorders like insomnia.
“Although sleep is so fundamental to our life, how the brain falls asleep has been a mystery,” says Nir Grossman at Imperial College London. It has widely been believed to be an incremental process, in which the brain steadily transitions from wakefulness to sleep. But evidence supporting this has been limited.
