Why do we startle when we fall asleep?

There are plenty of common misconceptions out there about love: that opposites attract or that you should feel butterflies in your stomach immediately, for example. Another one is that women always fall in love first, and films often reinforce that last stereotype, portraying wom ...  Show more

According to the British Coffee Association, we drink around 98 million cups of coffee per day in the UK. That’s around one and a half cups for every single person in the country! It’s said that drinking coffee in the evening or even late afternoon has a negative impact on sleep ...  Show more

Have you ever started to fall asleep and then suddenly – whoa! – you jolt awake? What’s up with that? We asked sleep specialist Chris Winter to help us find the answer. Got a question that has you losing sleep? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll pull an all-nighter ...  Show more

For as long as people have been sleeping, about half of us have probably suffered from sleep paralysis. Thanks to an unusual fluke in the sleep cycle, the sufferer feels paralyzed and consumed by fear as something on their chest tries to kill them.

Have you ever woken up in the middle of eating a sandwich? Felt paralyzed in your bed? Or maybe you heard an earth-shattering explosion just as you were falling asleep that nobody else heard. We'll learn more about parasomnias, the strange medical phenomena that fascinate people ...  Show more

Why do some of us do bizarre things in our sleep? Like riding a motorbike, using a shoe to 'phone for a pizza or even having sex while sleeping? These are complex behaviours and yet sleepwalkers aren't aware of what they're doing and often have no memory of their strange night-ti ...  Show more