From cutting out caffeine to a pricey mattress, some of us go to great lengths to get a good night’s sleep. But a new high-tech approach takes these efforts to the next level. It involves wearing a headset and earphones that deliver quiet pulses of sounds designed to enhance the function of your sleep. While the research is still at an early stage, the goals include letting people reduce the amount of sleep they take or helping people to feel more refreshed after their usual length of sleep. If this works, it would definitely be of future impact for society, but also for clinical conditions. They calibrate the volume of the noises so they are just loud enough to affect brainwaves but not loud enough to wake up the sleeper, using 50-microsecond pulses of “pink noise” Most of the studies so far have tried this approach on people who are in deep sleep, when brainwaves are at their slowest, cycling at around once per second. Although much about the function of sleep is still unclear, one idea is that it is during deep sleep that recent memories are strengthened. A key study from 2013 tested the technique’s effects on memory by asking volunteers to wear the electrodes and earphones at night after they had tried to memories a list of 120 pairs of words. In the morning, they were given one word and asked to repeat its pair.
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Tuesday, December 3, 2024