SLEEP SECRETS

THIS week: Sleepwalking AS RECENTLY as the Thirties, sleepwalking, talking or eating while asleep were still attributed to supernatural causes.

Now these are called parasomnias from the Greek para and Latin somnus mean faulty and sleep. Dr Roger Broughton, director of the Ottawa Sleep Medicine Centre, showed parasomnias are not driven by dreaming as thought — sleeping patients’ brainwaves showed their parasomniac behaviours hardly occur in REM (dreaming) sleep, but in deep ‘slow-wave’ sleep. Broughton, now emeritus professor of neurology and neuroscience at Ottawa University, reported in 2015 that evidence suggests that during sleepwalking areas of the brain become unlinked, with some parts ‘technically awake’ while others remain deep in slumber.