ELI5: Are you truly unconscious when sleeping, or do you just lay there, semi-aware, still thinking but zoned out while your body rests?
ELI5: Are you truly unconscious when sleeping, or do you just lay there, semi-aware, still thinking but zoned out while your body rests?
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You are most of the time truly unconscious, ie, unaware of your environment around you.
Your brain however will go through periods of high activity and low activity. The high activity periods we call “REM” (Rapid Eye Movement) or better known as dreaming. If you weren’t unconscious you would be able to remember every dream you had last night, but, we don’t really remember dreams unless we get interrupted and awoken during them.
You are very much semi-aware while sleeping. Your body is actively taking and processing lots of information while asleep. Light, sound, temperature, time, touch. Your body and mind process all this (and more) while you are asleep.
No, you are not unconscious while sleeping.
Psychologists think of consciousness on a scale: you can be anywhere from super alert to dead.
Some of the scale includes, in order: Alert, Drowsy, Sleeping, Unconscious, Comatose, Catatonic, Dead.
Sleeping is higher on the scale than unconscious because the brain still does some “conscious” stuff during certain parts of sleep (such as dreaming or occasionally rolling over) whereas when you are unconscious these things usually don’t happen.
Unconscious definition:
> Not conscious
Conscious definition:
> aware of and responding to one’s surroundings; awake.
So definitionally you are unconscious while you’re sleeping. Your brain isn’t fully shut down in the way that anesthesia does, you want to be able to wake up in an emergency after all, but you aren’t really aware of or responding to your surroundings, and you definitely aren’t awake
There’s a huge difference between sleep and being unconscious. I’ve had a few operations, so I’ve been under more than once. When you are under anaesthetic, you do not exist. It’s not like being asleep, because when you are asleep you sort of know where you are, how long you’ve been asleep for. Going under is completely different, you feel like you simply stopped existing.
Depends on what you mean by “unconscious.”
Think of your brain like the downtown of a major city. At night–when you’re sleeping–some of the businesses shut down, there’s less traffic, etc. But some businesses operate better at night, like clubs, and some maintenance tasks like street-sweeping or trash pickup operate better when there’s fewer people out and about.
Sleeping is like that. Some areas of your brain have reduced activity, some have increased activity. Some processes are unaffected, others change the way they operate, some completely shut down, and some start up.
The result is that your conscious mind kind of shuts down, but not all the way. You’re still “thinking” in that parts of your mind are working, but necessarily in the same way they would as if you were awake.
Anecdotally, I sometimes have a weird type of lucid dream where I’m aware and thinking about stuff all night (or at least what feels like all night) without “dreaming” per se, but also unaware that I’m actually asleep at the moment. I also rarely get the kind of sleep paralysis where I’m entirely awake and lucid, except that I can’t move–but without the hallucinations other people describe. Sleep is weird, and levels of awareness during sleep vary by person and by situation.
I would suggest both sometimes but not at the same time.
You’re not unconscious. Part of the definition of sleep is that the organism is “arousable” – able to be woken up by external stimuli like sound or touch (like you said, semi-aware). Scientists say that we have three distinct neurological states in life:: wake, non-REM sleep, and REM sleep. So both types of sleep are unique brain states
There’s a part of your brain that still processes sensory input, which can wake you up when you hear an out of place little noise on the other side of the house
Technically you’re conscious, as you will react to issues that arise, such as falling out of bed, loud noises, or other things that are deemed a problem. But mentally, you yourself are unconscious, you’re subconsciously reacting to these things, in a way that will pull you out of the unconscious state.
Physically speaking, you’re conscious. Mentally speaking, you’re unconscious.
You are still listening for danger when you are asleep. This is a big problem if you live in an area with high levels of stressful background noise because you are still stressed out by those noises even during your sleep.
Blood pressure rises from noise during your sleep study report.
You’re still there in a semi-aware state, but your long term-memory isn’t recording anything.
This is why you generally only remember dreams when you wake up in the middle of one. Your brain doesn’t start recording until you wake up, and even then you forget them quickly if you don’t think about them actively and get the information out of short-term memory and into long-term.
So you’re still ‘conscious’ but only operating with short-term memory, so nothing gets saved. This way if there’s a loud noise or you get stabbed or something you still hear/feel it instantly and can respond.
This is wildly different from actual unconsciousness caused by head trauma or general anesthesia which “turn you off” for a while.