Feeling awake while asleep: neural signatures of sleep state misperception – SleepTight

In France ~20% of adults complain of bad sleep. Yet, quantifying sleep disturbances is difficult when classical tools used to assess sleep fail to uncover abnormalities. In other words, some individuals can feel awake despite their brain appearing physiologically asleep.

To better understand this phenomenon of sleep state misperception (SSM), I will implement novel analytic tools to analyse sleep recordings and identify the neural correlates of SSM. To do so, I will leverage recent advances in computational neuroscience and machine learning. I will apply these tools to existing data obtained in good sleepers, insomnia patients with SSM and without SSM.

I will also seek to identify the causes of SSM. I hypothesise that SSM could be induced by a failure to isolate from the surrounding environment during sleep. To test this, I will play sounds to good sleepers and insomnia patients with SSM during a night in the sleep lab. I will use covert (brain) and overt (muscular contractions) indexes of responses to check whether SSM patients are more likely to respond to external stimulations during their sleep, even when they do not wake up.

I also hypothesise that SSM could stem from the excessive processing/perception of internal information generated during sleep: dreams. To do so, I will study a clinical population diagnosed with excessive and tiring dreaming (“epic dreaming”) and check whether epic dreaming is associated with SSM.

By unravelling the neural correlates and possible causes of SSM, this project will shed a new light on the feeling of being awake while asleep. This research could improve the diagnosis and clinical management of SSM and associated sleep disturbances, with huge benefits for patients and society as these insufficiently studied types of sleep disturbances represent a huge health and economic burden.