From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um.

Answering those questions that make you go,

um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, I. I'm Rosie DuPont.

Have you ever heard someone talking in their sleep?

Maybe a sibling or a friend having a sleepover.

They're totally out, but then they start saying things.

The weirdest part might be that they have no idea when they wake up that they were mumbling things about marshmallows in outer space or

something wild like that. One of our listeners wondered what else we do in our sleep.

Hi, my name is Libby, and I am eight years old

and I live in Netherland, Colorado. And my question is, do we sneeze when we are sleeping,

but we just don't notice? Bye. Almost certainly not. Hi, I'm Michael Howell. I'm a neurologist who is

interested in sleep disorders at the University of Minnesota.

Sneezing is something that happens during the day, which helps clear out any noxious particles that gets up into our nose.

So usually, first of all, we're not really walking around. We don't have a lot of air circulating through our nose when we're sleeping.

We do a little bit, but not a lot. In addition to that, when you fall asleep, your brain is less

responsive to the environment. Certainly, we don't remember things, but if someone comes up and

pinches you while you're asleep, I may very well not even notice it. Same thing with

these noxious feelings that can cause us to sneeze, whether or not it's a little bit of pollen

in our nose or whether or not it's a little bit of dust. If those things circulate in through

our nose when we're sleeping, it's very unlikely that

our brain will trigger a sneeze because it's just not body. Our brain isn't receiving that

noxious signal. If someone were to wake up sneezing, I would in fact even say that

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