The brain goes out a few minutes before bedtime, the new study shows

A new study reveals that a sudden and rapid change of brain changes away from soft sleep.

Researchers have discovered a key turning point that occurs just minutes before bedtime, reports Science Alert.

Using brain scans of thousands of volunteers, scientists from the Royal London College (ICL) and the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom have observed a surprisingly unexpected change in the electrical activity of the brain about 4.5 minutes before a person falls asleep.

We discovered that falling asleep is a bifurcyton, not a gradual process, with a clear turning point that can be predicted in real time. The ability to follow how the individual brain falls asleep has profound implications for our sense of sleep and the development of new treatments for people who have difficulty falling asleep”, explains I neuroscientist CL, Nir Grossman.

The team developed a model that transformed 47 characteristics of brain activity, recorded by an electroencephalogram (EEG), into an abstract mathematical space.

This allowed them to follow the changes in the brain from the moment they went to sleep until they fell asleep. When drawn graphicly, the trajectory resembles a ball that rolls down an increasingly steep slope toward an unexpected decline.

Using this model, scientists took only one night to register an individual's brain activity to predict the time when he would fall asleep in the following nights with 95 percent accuracy and a margin of error of just 49 seconds.

Now we can take an individual, measure his brain activity and tell him every second how far he is from sleeping, at any given moment, with an accuracy that was previously impossible”, Grossman told New Scientist.

In addition to the best sense of healthy sleep, such knowledge can help experts to diagnose and treat sleep disorders such as insomnia or excessive sleepiness during the day. Research is published in the prestigious journal Nature Neuroscience./Periscopi/