THE brain hears everything while we are asleep but doesn’t bother converting sounds into conscious thoughts, an eight-year study has found.
Boffins found that our ability to identify sounds gets switched off while we snooze.
The brain responds to and analyses sounds, but doesn’t pass them on to our consciousness.
We experience a rise in the level of alpha-beta waves when we sleep which are associated with attention and expectation.
According to the study, the strength of alpha-beta waves is the main difference between the brain’s response to noise in states of wakefulness and sleep.