Are you sleeping ? Answering this question necessarily leads to a denial since, by definition, if one is sleeping, one cannot really answer. Sleep has long been defined as a state of disconnection of our consciousness from the outside world. Wrongly. The DreamTeam team from the Brain and Spine Institute (ICM) at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital (Paris) studies our sleep, our dreams and our consciousness. However, some of their recent work has focused on the ability to communicate with people who are sleeping.
In a first article, published in 2021, in collaboration with researchers in Germany, Italy and the United States, they wanted to study the possibility of dialogue in real time with patients who had lucid dreams. These are considered dreams that only a handful of people can have, during which they know they are dreaming. During these phases, the scientists asked questions of simple arithmetic or involving binary answers (yes/no) to their guinea pigs, then they observed their brain activity as well as their reactions. The results showed that participants could respond live to questions through certain muscle contractions and voluntary eye movements. This article has challenged the belief that a person who sleeps is cut off from the outside world, but also the idea that learning during sleep is impossible. Such a demonstration opens the way to a multitude of applications but above all allows a new way of exploring and studying our dreams.
However, not all of us are capable of lucid dreaming, let alone on command. Are those who are not part of this group therefore condemned to an impenetrable enclosure? Not so fast! In a new article that was submitted for publication in early May by the DreamTeam under the direction of Dr. Delphine Oudiette and in collaboration with the Picnic Lab team (also belonging to the ICM), the researchers wanted to see if the communication was possible with everyone and in different stages of sleep. For this experiment, they recruited participants suffering from narcolepsy as well as “healthy” participants. Then they taught them to frown or smile when they heard certain words or pseudo-words. The challenge was to find these same behavioral responses during their sleep. And it was the case !
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Understanding our sleep and consciousness
Contractions of the corrugators or zygomaticus are found in all stages of sleep and in both groups, with the exception of the “slow wave sleep” phases in healthy subjects. These muscle responses far exceed the spontaneous contractions usually seen while sleeping. In addition, by performing electroencephalograms (EEGs), researchers have found brain reactions that seem to indicate high cognitive states and that can predict the absence or presence of responses to stimuli during sleep.
According to Dr. Oudiette, these results provide evidence that humans exhibit, at all levels of sleep, periods of sensory connection to the outside world during which they have the ability to process certain information they receive. These findings, she continues, have important implications for our understanding of sleep and consciousness: first, they run counter to the hypothesis that behavioral responses to external stimuli disappear when we sleep; second, they indicate that the sensory processing during sleep by our brain is capable of certain high-level cognitive tasks; third, they question the validity of the current sleep stage classification model, which seems ill-suited to capture a wide variety of mental states.
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Finally, since these periods of sensory connections can be predicted in EEG, we could target them for real-time communication with sleepers and explore their mental state as well as their cognitive processes. In short, if we still do not know if our dreams have a meaning, we begin to discuss with them to lift the veil on what is happening in the kingdom of Morpheus.
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