Waking up

[psi20]

Why will only a select few sounds wake you up sometimes? Like a train goes by and you don't wake up. But then the phone rings and you wake up. How does that happen?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Obviously your brain knows what you would pay attention to normally, and what you wouldn't, and applies that to sleep as well.

[jordan]

So you mean trains never wake you up but phones always do?

 

If not, it would be simply dependent on how deep of a sleep you're in.

[[Tycho?]]

Its probably your subconscious at work. Regular sounds may not wake you up as easily. Sounds that happen all the time, cars going by, furnace going, creaking of a house, things you hear every night you grow accustomed to. Eventually you dont even register the sounds on a conscious level. While a comparitavly quiet sound may wake you up if you dont regularly hear it.

 

Or it just depends on how asleep you are at a given time.

[Glider]

Tycho is right, novelty is the key. Trains tend to go by on a regular basis. It's the same for people who live near airports or motorways. They habituate to the noises, so they no longer register. However, phones ring at random. When you are sleeping, you will filter out all 'known' or expected (by which I mean regular) sounds, but a novel sound will trigger an alert and wake you.

[kether]

Why will only a select few sounds wake you up sometimes? Like a train goes by and you don't wake up. But then the phone rings and you wake up. How does that happen?

 

Could it be that you are programmed to ANSWER a phone? (response)

A train is something you CATCH

[5614]

yes so far you are all correct, in a way, but the correct answer to the original question had to have been the answer by [Tycho?]

 

well done!

 

basically it is the subconscience at work, all sounds are monitored by your brain, while some sounds will 'activate' your brain and wake you up, others will be filtered out! most commonly, sounds effect your dreams! multiple scientific experiments have been carried out to prove this, and nearly all prove what i just said, so when someone hears a siren, they will normally have a dream about some kind of emergancy, where there are either police, ambulance, or fire engines, this is how a recent gadget by the japenese works, you give it a setting, it tries to manipulate your dreams, to the setting, however it uses the additions of scents and gentle lighing effects aswell, but it is the sound, which is the main thing which makes it work.

 

so yes, it is the subconscience, which wakes you up depending on what it thinks the noise's priority level is, (in a way, anyway!)

 

i dont think that how regular the sound is, has much to do with it! if you are in multiple accidents, all involving a certain noise, e.g. if, as a child, the opening of your door when you are asleep wakes you up, because your brain knows it is someone coming in, and wants to warn you, so wakes you up, but no matter how many times someone opens your door to wake you up, no matter how used to the noise you get, that noise will always wake you up! [thats true, it happened to me!]

[coquina]

I once had a particularly obnoxious alarm clock - it sounded like an air raid siren. After a few mornings of being scared silly by it, I would wake up about 30 seconds before it went off - giving me just enough time to turn it off ahead of time. How are our biological clocks programmed so precisely?

[kether]

Found this. Might help. (Might be worth a tick, or a tock)

 

http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/clocks/clocks_main.html

[5614]

nice website, good find!

 

biological clocks always fascinated me, but as biology was not my subject, i never followed up my interests in it! i prefer chem / physics!

 

i suppose, theyre very useful things to have! [biological clocks!]

 

saved coquina on a fare few occasions i dare say!

[Phi for All]

I would wake up about 30 seconds before it went off - giving me just enough time to turn it off ahead of time.

This happens to me whenever I have an early flight to catch or an important meeting I have to get up early for. Even though my alarm is set for a classical radio station to wake me (and they don't play Wagner in the A.M., it always pretty mellow), because it's important to wake up I'll wake up and look at the clock and it's always about 2-5 minutes before the alarm is supposed to go off.

 

Recently my daughter broke her leg. It's in a cast and she's too young for crutches, so I gave her a whistle to clip to her pillow if she needs me to carry her to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I've programmed myself for the sound of that whistle and now I'm hearing it's pitch EVERYWHERE! Brakes squeaking on the rancher's tractor behind my house, kids whistling for each other outside, test signals on TV, so many things have the same pitch. We are conditioned to recognize sounds that are important and we filter out the mundane.

[coquina]

Thanks for the link, it was quite interesting. I now have a "furry gray alarm clock", an eighteen year old Maine Coon cat named "The Toad" - he goes off at 6am, doesn't have a snooze alarm, and doesn't know the difference between weekdays and weekends.