According to research published in iScience by the University of Freiburg in Germany, the things that go bump in the night may not be monsters that want to harm you, but they might harm you all the same as just random, seemingly harmless background noises that aren’t loud enough to wake you might still be enough to disrupt the brain’s memory centers, causing some memories to fade before they’re fully stored.
Right off the bat, just know that it’s a rather small study that only involved 20 healthy young adults who were tasked with learning visual and motor tasks before taking a three-hour nap. During one session, they slept in total silence. During another, they heard random sequences of clicking sounds through headphones. The participants hardly ever woke up, having slept for nearly the entire amount of time, and reported having felt wide awake and alert afterward.
Their brains, on the other hand, were a little worse for wear.
Random Noises While You Sleep Could Make Some Memories Fade
EEG recordings showed that all those random, seemingly harmless sounds significantly reduced deep sleep, replacing it with lighter sleep stages. Those teeny tiny insignificant sounds were enough to disrupt slow brain waves, the large electrical pulses that help transfer memories from the temporary storage portions of our brains to the long-term memory areas by coordinating communication between different parts of the brain.
Once the participants woke up from their nap, they performed noticeably worse on visuospatial memory tasks, such as remembering shapes or navigating a maze. Other functions of memory, like word recall and finger-tapping skills, were mostly unaffected, probably because they’re less dependent on deep sleep.
None of this necessarily means that any little sound during sleep is inherently harmful. But there seems to be something uniquely corrupting about the ambient noises that happen during sleep that we may or may not be able to control, which I’m sure is exactly what you want to hear as you struggle to get a good night’s rest after doing everything in your power to make sure your bedroom is as conducive to sleep as possible.
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