Duke University Medical Center neurobiologists have demonstrated that they could distinguish in unprecedented detail the patterns of brain activity — including fleeting changes in communication among brain structures — in awake animals, as they fall sleep and as they transition among different sleep stages.

They believe that their new analytical technique will enable unprecedented insights into function of both the healthy brain and those afflicted with neurological disease.

Their analysis could distinguish the fleeting changes in the brain as the animals transitioned from one sleep state from the other. They could also predict such changes, because at that moment, these different structures fire together for a few hundred milliseconds to create a synchronous pattern of firing that is a signature of the change from the previous state to the next.