Washington DC, Feb. 23 -- Researchers from the GIGA - Centre of Research Cyclotron at the University of Liege discovered that the body reacts to the external world when sleeping, which explains how sensory input might alter sleep quality.

Researchers at ULiege have collaborated with the University of Fribourg in Switzerland to investigate whether the body is truly disconnected from the external world during sleep. To do so, they focused on how heartbeat changes when we hear different words during sleep. They found that relaxing words slowed down cardiac activity as a reflection of deeper sleep and in comparison to neutral words that did not have such a slowing effect. This discovery is presented in Journal of Sleep Research and sheds new...