Rest well. Waking up in the morning completely relaxed and satisfied after a ideal sleep for quality and quantity. For many it seems almost a dream, and not only for the classic spring fatigue linked to the change of season but also for the many stresses that accompany this period. But beware: the sleep stages they are not all the same and during the night we “go through” different moments with the alternation of a deeper sleep and a sort of light sleep.
There are people, especially in the third age but not only, who see these periods of deep sleep shorten and therefore have greater difficulty in “cleaning” the brain from the waste of the previous day. For those with these problems, a solution could come from an original research conducted by the experts of ETH Zurich, who managed to create a sort of “headband” to be worn capable of sending targeted sound messages able to facilitate the stay in this phase of the night’s rest. The study was published in Communications Medicine.
What happens when we sleep
There is sleep and sleep. Our rest, as scientific studies show, it is characterized by a cascade of events that follow one another in well-established cycles. Each cycle, which lasts about an hour and a half, is done by one non-Rem sleep phase it’s a sleep phase Remthe one in which the eyes move, the body behaves as if it were awake and dreams.
The REM phase takes up only 20 percent of the entire cycle. In the non-REM phase, instead, there are four phases: the first two of light sleep, in which even a noise is enough to wake up, while the third and fourth are characterized by deep sleep. Swiss scholars have made it clear that slow waves, that is particular findings in polysomnography (a sort of electroencephalogram of sleep) that occur precisely during the phases of deep sleep, can somehow be “facilitated” thanks to a stimulation system that acts directly on hearing.
In practice it is only a sort of very light pop, almost imperceptible, which however manages to better synchronize brain reactions during this phase of rest, making it easier to maintain slow waves and therefore deep sleep. The device is applied in a very simple way: just one simple headbandlike the ones we wear when we run to keep our hair up, which contains earphones and detection systems to understand when to send that simple “click” that can help you rest well.
How the device works
The headband should be put on before going to bed. Thanks to the presence of very small electrodes, which work in complete silence, it is able to monitor regularly what happens in the brain of someone who is sleeping, with real-time analysis of what is happening. By exploiting these mechanisms, all hidden in the special band to be worn to cover the ears, the system developed by the experts coordinated by Caroline Lustenberger can create a sort of deep brain stimulation just when it is needed. When slow waves and therefore deep sleep appear, a very short auditory signal can be triggered which has the task of creating a particular condition for the neurons involved, a kind of optimal “synchronization” of their activity.
In this way, slow waves improve and with being sleep. The device has already been tested on a population of people over-60 with really satisfactory results. We are only at the beginning but these first clinical observations, on a small number of people, show that there are subjects who respond well to this auditory stimulus, while others have less satisfactory results. In short, there is still a lot to do to achieve optimal rest. But the road is fascinating.