Slow-wave sleep 2026-11-05
Slow-wave sleep is a deep stage of non-rapid eye movement sleep characterized by prominent slow, high-amplitude activity in an electroencephalography recording. It is a physiological classification based on measured brain activity and other sleep criteria, rather than simply an unusually motionless posture. In current human staging it broadly corresponds to N3. [ref]
Sleep-stage identification can guide interventions. In a human experiment, an odour associated with earlier learning was presented again during slow-wave sleep; subsequent declarative-memory performance was compared with control conditions. [ref] This links a defined physiological state to an experimentally timed cue; it does not establish that every kind of memory depends exclusively on that one stage.