Researchers reporting in Current Biology have found in studies of mice that pupil size also fluctuates during sleep, reports Phys.org.
“We found that pupil size rhythmically fluctuates during sleep,” says Daniel Huber of the University of Geneva in Switzerland. “Intriguingly, these pupil fluctuations follow the sleep-related brain activity so closely that they can indicate with high accuracy the exact stage of sleep—the smaller the pupil, the deeper the sleep.”
Studies of pupil size had always been a challenge for an obvious reason: people and animals generally sleep with their eyes closed. Huber says that he and his colleagues were inspired to study pupil size in sleep after discovering that their laboratory mice sometimes sleep with their eyes open. They knew that pupil size varies strongly during wakefulness. What, they wondered, happened during sleep?
