Neural plasticity transcends a range of spatio-temporal scales and serves as the basis of various brain activities and physiologic functions. At the microscopic level, it enables the emergence of brain waves with complex temporal dynamics. At the macroscopic level, presence and dominance of specific brain waves is associated with important brain functions. The role of neural plasticity at diffe...

The physiological significance of the fractal component of short-term, spontaneous heart rate variability (HRV) in humans remains unclear. The aim of the present study was to gain further information about the respective fractal components by extracting them from HRV, blood pressure variability (BPV), and instantaneous lung volume (ILV) time series via coarse graining spectral analysis in nine ...

To study the effects of nitrogen addition to the breathing mixture on sleep disturbances at pressure, two dives were performed in which helium-nitrogen-oxygen mixture was used up to 450 m sea water (msw). In total, sleep of 12 professional divers was analyzed (i.e., 184 night records). Sleep was disrupted by compression and by stay at 450 msw: we observed an increase in awake periods and in sle...

The duration of each episode of any one electrophysiological sleep stage or any episode of intervening wakefulness was determined in three kinds of disturbed sleep, namely, in naturally impaired sleep of late middle-aged, normal people, in sleep after caffeine administration, and in sleep after hypnotic drug withdrawal. When compared with the sleep of young people, the sleep of late middle-aged...

Human studies of sleep and cognition have established thatdifferent sleep stages contribute to distinct aspects of cognitive and emotional processing. However, since the majority of these findings are based on single-night studies, it is difficult to determine whether such effects arise due to individual, between-subject differences in sleep patterns, or from within-subject variations in sleep ...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effects of a mandibular advancement device on apneas and sleep in mild, moderate, and severe obstructive sleep apnea. DESIGN Prospective study. SUBJECTS Forty-four of 47 patients included. INTERVENTION Individually adjusted mandibular advancement devices. MEASUREMENTS Polysomnographic sleep recordings for 1 night without the device and 1 night with it, with a m...

Six normal volunteers, aged 20 to 39 years, underwent 2 adaptation nights and three sessions of 2 consecutive experimental nights and days at 1-week intervals, according to a latin-square design. In the three sessions, subjects received either zopiclone, 3.75 mg or 7.5 mg, or placebo at 2215 h in a double-blind protocol. On nights 1 and 2 of each session, subjects were continuously monitored po...

Based on the knowledge that sensory processing continues during sleep and that a relationship exists between sleep and learning, a new strategy for treatment of idiopathic subjective tinnitus, consisted of customized sound stimulation presented during sleep, was tested. It has been previously shown that this treatment induces a sustained decrease in tinnitus intensity; however, its effect on br...

We study correlation properties of the magnitude and the sign of the increments in the time intervals between successive heartbeats during light sleep, deep sleep, and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep using the detrended fluctuation analysis method. We find short-range anticorrelations in the sign time series, which are strong during deep sleep, weaker during light sleep, and even weaker during R...

The sleep homeostatic response significantly affects the state of anesthesia. In addition, sleep recovery may occur during anesthesia, either via a natural sleep-like process to occur or via a direct restorative effect. Little is known about the effects of isoflurane anesthesia on sleep homeostasis. We investigated whether 1) isoflurane anesthesia could provide a sleep-like process, and 2) the ...