Your brain produces more entropy while you are awake
By analysing brain scans of asleep and awake people, researchers have found that the amount of entropy our brains produce varies with consciousness
Mind
8 February 2023
Electrical signals in our brains produce entropy as part of processing information Shutterstock/Gorodenkoff
Our brains produce more entropy when we are awake than when we are asleep. The finding could lead to better ways to measure the consciousness of people in comas.
Entropy is a measure of disorder and in our universe, everything tends to move from less disorder to more over time. For instance, breaking a coffee cup increases entropy. While this breaking can happen in many ways, you never see a broken cup spontaneously re-assemble itself and therefore decrease …