Why Some People Can Sleep Through Anything

Bill Briggs writes: Light sleepers, insomniacs and groggy zombies of all stripes, take a healthy gulp of your triple-shot espresso and rest easy.

Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen knows of what you dream: a full night of slumber uninterrupted by noise. You crave blissful bedtime silence – at least inside your head. And he’s working on it.

Ellenbogen, chief of the sleep medicine division at Massachusetts General Hospital, and a team of researchers believe they have cracked a brain-wave code that predicts how and why some people are more easily stirred from slumber by bumps in the night while others can saw logs through clanking garbage trucks and snoring partners.

In short, he found, if you’re not sleeping well, you can blame your spindles. That’s what doctors have dubbed quick bursts of brain activity that our thalamus gives off every 10 to 60 seconds as we sleep. For years, scientists have theorized that these spindles may be signs that the thalamus, essentially a sleep shield, is working to block sounds or other sensory information, helping to keep us in dreamland.

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