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At a sleep research symposium in January 2020, Janna Lendner presented findings that hint at a way to look at people’s brain activity for signs of the boundary between wakefulness and unconsciousness. For patients who are comatose or under anesthesia, it can be all-important that physicians make that distinction correctly. Doing so is trickier than it might sound, however, because when someone is in the dreaming state of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, their brain produces the same familiar, smoothly oscillating brain waves as when they are awake.
Lendner argued, though, that the answer isn’t in the regular brain waves, but rather is an aspect of neural activity that scientists might normally ignore: the erratic background noise.
Some researchers seemed incredulous. “They said, ‘So, you’re telling me that there’s, like, information in the noise?’” said Lendner, an anesthesiology resident at the University Medical Center in Tübingen, Germany, who recently completed a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley. “I said, ‘Yes. Someone’s noise is another one’s signal.’”
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Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine; noise generated by Thomas Donoghue
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