ArticleNature neuroscience2025
Falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation dynamic.
Article in Nature neuroscience, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A methodological guideline for consciousness assessment via neural electrophysiological activity.Military Medical Research · 2025Guideline
- Sleep circuit modulation: from animal models to human translation.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2026Review
- Learning the bistable cortical dynamics of the sleep-onset period.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Night-to-Night Sleep Variability Modulates Subjective Sleep Perception in Chronic Insomnia: A Multilevel Analysis.Nature and science of sleep · 2026Article
- Characterizing transition state in mouse vigilance with electroencephalogram-electromyogram hypnodensity.Sleep advances : a journal of the Sleep Research Society · 2026Article
- Two views of the brain are reconciled by a unifying principle of maximal information processing.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Sleep is a fundamental part of our lives; yet, how our brain falls asleep remains one of the most enduring mysteries of neuroscience. Here we report a new conceptual framework to analyze and model this phenomenon. The framework represents the changes in brain electroencephalogram activity during the transition into sleep as a trajectory in a normalized feature space. We use the framework to show that the brain's wake-to-sleep transition follows bifurcation dynamics with a distinct tipping point preceded by a critical slowing down. We validate the bifurcation dynamics in two independent datasets, which include more than 1,000 human participants. Finally, we demonstrate the framework's utility by predicting a person's progression into sleep in real time with seconds temporal resolution and over 0.95 average accuracy.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.