The EEG during deep sleep exhibits a distinct cortically generated slow oscillation of around and below 1 Hz which can be distinguished from other delta (0.5-3.5 Hz) activity. Intracranial studies showed that this slow oscillation triggers and groups cortical network firing. In the present study, we examined whether the phases of the slow oscillation during sleep stage 4 are correlated with the...

Kahn and Hobson (1993) proposed that dreams are a product of self-organization of brain during sleep. As a complex system far from equilibrium state, the dreaming brain may form a new pattern by the interaction between components within this system. At REM sleep stage, signals from neuronal clusters self-organize and form image fragments, then the image fragments interact and produce images, an...

CONTEXT Sex differences in dynamic measures have been established in physically mature populations. Gaining information on maturation's effect on dynamic performance measures implicated in injury risk may enable us to better design injury prevention programs. OBJECTIVE To examine sex differences in dynamic valgus alignment and triple-hop distance measures across maturational stages in males a...

Although the sequence of pubertal maturation remains consistent across most individuals, the timing and tempo of development fluctuate widely. While past research has largely focused on the sequelae of pubertal timing, a faster tempo of maturation might also present special challenges to children for acclimating to new biological and social milestones. Using latent growth curve modeling, the pr...

This review summarises the results of event-related potentials studies exploring the extent to which the human brain can extract semantic information from external stimuli during sleep. The persistence of a differential response to the subject's own name, relative to any other proper name, during stage 2 (S2) and paradoxical (REM) sleep (PS) suggests that the brain remains able to discriminate ...

The objective of this study is to develop and assess an automatic algorithm based on the peripheral arterial tone (PAT) signal to differentiate between light and deep sleep stages. The PAT signal is a measure of the pulsatile arterial volume changes at the finger tip reflecting sympathetic tone variations and is recorded by an ambulatory unattended device, the Watch-PAT100, which has been shown...

OBJECTIVE The relevance of the dimensional complexity (DC) for the analysis of sleep EEG data is investigated and compared to linear measures. METHODS We calculated DC of artifact-free 1 min segments of all-night sleep EEG recordings of 4 healthy young subjects. Non-linearity was tested by comparing with DC values of surrogate data. Linear properties of the segments were characterized by esti...

The last decade has witnessed a spurt of new publications documenting sleep's essential contribution to the brains ability to form lasting memories. For the declarative memory domain, slow wave sleep (the deepest sleep stage) has the greatest beneficial effect on the consolidation of memories acquired during preceding wakefulness. The finding that newly encoded memories become reactivated durin...

The weakening of the geomagnetic field causes an increase in galactic cosmic ray (GCR) flux. Some researchers argue that enhanced GCR flux might lead to a climatic cooling by increasing low cloud formation, which enhances albedo (umbrella effect). Recent studies have reported geological evidence for a link between weakened geomagnetic field and climatic cooling. However, more work is needed on ...

PURPOSE Whether interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs) increase, decrease, or are unchanged before epileptic seizures has implications for the pathophysiology of epilepsy. Prior studies relating IEDs and seizures have not demonstrated a change in IEDs before seizures. However, they have not controlled for changes in the depth of sleep. Our objective was to test the hypothesis that IEDs are r...