Time-varying effective connectivity of the cortical neuroelectric activity associated with behavioural microsleeps

An episode of complete failure to respond during an attentive task accompanied by behavioural signs of sleep is called a behavioural microsleep. We proposed a combination of high-resolution EEG and an advanced method for time-varying effective connectivity estimation for reconstructing the temporal evolution of the causal relations between cortical regions when microsleeps occur during a continuous visuomotor task. We found connectivity patterns involving left–right frontal, left–right parietal, and left-frontal/right-parietal connections commencing in the interval [− 500; − 250] ms prior to the onset of microsleeps and disappearing at the end of the microsleeps. Our results from global graph indices derived from effective connectivity analysis have revealed EEG-based biomarkers of all stages of microsleeps (preceding, onset, pre-recovery, recovery). In particular, this raises the possibility of being able to predict microsleeps in real-world tasks and initiate a ‘wake-up’ intervention to avert the microsleeps and, hence, prevent injurious and even multi-fatality accidents.