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Exploding Head Syndrome: What We Know About This Mysterious Disorder

Have you ever been drifting off to sleep, only to be jerked awake by the sound of a bomb going off inside your head? If you have, then you have most likely experienced exploding head syndrome, a mysterious and poorly understood sleep disorder.

A typical episode is characterised by the experience of an abrupt loud noise or a sense of an explosion inside the head that occurs during the transition from wakefulness to sleep. As reticular activity slows down in the transition to sleep, our sensory cortices that govern vision, sound, and motor movement start to shut down. It has been proposed that the experience of EHS is due to a disruption in this normal switching-off process, which gives rise to delayed and disjointed surge of neuronal activation to sensory networks in the absence of any external stimuli.

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