Excitability and susceptibility of the brain's electrical activity during sleep: An analysis of late components of aeps and veps

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Abstract
We investigated ten healthy male subjects and measured late components of AEPs and VEPs during sleep. According to Rechtschaffen and Kales (1968) we performed an off-line scoring procedure of sleep-EEG and averaged the AEPs and VEPs of five different periods, corresponding to sleep stages I, II, III, IV and REM. From the averaged evoked potentials we computed the amplitude-frequency-characteristic (AFC) of the brain (Basar, 1980) during different sleep stages. These AFCs characterize transfer properties of an oscillating system. A comparison of different AFCs has shown that the excitability of the brain depicts a clear alpha resonance during stage I, a pronounced delta resonance during stages II, III and IV, and a theta resonance during REM sleep. A comparison of these results from linear system theory with the nonlinear dynamical behavior of the CNS was performed.