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Caffeine induces age-dependent brain complexity and criticality during sleep
Caffeine ingestion shifts sleep EEG towards higher complexity and criticality, flattening the 1/f slope and reducing long-range temporal correlations, reflecting enhanced excitation, especially in younger adults and particularly during NREM sleep.
Interpreting these data in the light of modeling and empirical work on EEG-derived measures of excitation-inhibition balance suggests that caffeine promotes a shift in brain dynamics towards increased neural excitation and closer proximity to a critical regime, particularly during NREM sleep. Importantly, throughout this study, we paid particular attention to probing the robustness of our results through rigorous methodological procedures: First, the caffeine and placebo were contrasted using standard inferential statistics (t-tests) as well as two cross-validated ML classification algorithms (SVM and LDA) to check for consistency. Note that by applying entropy not only to the raw EEG signal (SampEn), but also to the power spectrum (SpecEn), we gain insights into the degree of randomness in both the temporal and spectral domains of brain activity, providing complementary perspectives on neural dynamics.
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