Investigating the phase transition in human brain at the moment of awakening
Name
Kristjan-Julius Laak
Abstract
We take granted the ability to fall asleep or snap out of sleep into wakefulness, yet these transitions change our mental state completely and sometimes (e.g. fire alarm) very quickly. In this interdisciplinary study, modern computational techniques were applied to a relatively unique set of human brain data recorded from the scalp while the subjects were repeatedly woken up from asleep. A novel algorithm was built to automate the phase of cleaning the recordings from non-brain-related signals. With the aim to characterize the transition from sleep to wake state, many quantitative approaches were used and a state space technique was developed to examine these brain recordings. The awakening was associated with slow cortical potentials, an increase in power of a broad range of frequencies, emergence of gamma power, and a transpose in the state space.
Graduation Thesis language
English
Graduation Thesis type
Bachelor - Computer Science
Supervisor(s)
Raul Vicente, Jaan Aru
Defence year
2014