Snoring To Attention

Abstract

Why don’t you hear your own snoring, while your partner does? A Perceptual Learning and Matching System (PLMS) is hypothesized that pre-attends the auditory scene during sleep with the goal of classifying sounds into the background to be ignored or into the foreground which will cause arousal for further conscious action. It is also active while an individual is awake and is responsible for the automatic acquisition of capabilities such as non-conceptual linguistic components. In the case of chaotic snoring sounds, the partner’s PLMS cannot detect a pattern and will awaken the partner, while the snorer’s PLMS will correlate the snoring sounds directly with the individual’s own breathing pattern and hence, ignore it. The main purpose of this investigation is to understand the functional characteristics of PLMS during a sleep paradigm which is not confounded by consciousness nor rationality. PLMS is a hitherto new cognitive system not before studied. A secondary purpose is to investigate whether the PLMS of the snorer’s partner can be trained to ignore the snoring sounds. Several experiments are proposed to verify this possibility. Partners of snorers may be more affected than the snorers themselves!