A new study has revealed that around one in every five people develop the exploding head syndrome. Loud noises that keep occurring in the head of sufferers awaken them from sleep.

The syndrome is likely to occur while sleeping. Brain cells linked to hearing firing cause the syndrome. Problems with the brain cause exploding head syndrome while going to sleep. Various parts of brain turn off in different stages when people go to sleep.

Brian Sharpless, PhD, of Washington State University, said the sufferers get these crazy-loud noises they are unable to explain and he noises do not exist for real in environment.

Isolated sleep paralysis was also experienced by more than one third who experienced exploding syndrome. "Some people have worked these scary experiences into conspiracy theories and mistakenly believe the episodes are caused by some sort of directed-energy weapon. For this scary noise you hear at night when there's nothing going on in your environment, well, it might be the government messing with you", he said.

Dr. Sharpless explained that one of the drugs they gave for exploding head syndrome only helped to turn the volume down, not make the noises go away completely.

Published in the Journal of Sleep Research, the research has showed that head exploding syndrome is more common than thought.