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Sleep Engineering: This is how you will make your brain work better at night - Walla! health

2022-01-14T10:35:39.594Z


Sleep is a critical component in our health and is important physiologically and mentally. A sleep science expert who has been in the field for many years claims to have found a way to "engineer" his sleep


Sleep Engineering: This will make your brain work better at night

Sleep is a critical component in our health and is important physiologically and mentally.

A sleep science expert who has been in the field for many years claims that she has found a way to "engineer" our sleep so that it will be better and more efficient.

Walla!

health

14/01/2022

Friday, 14 January 2022, 11:34 Updated: 12:25

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Iris Cole interviews Prof. Ribi Tauman on sleep disorders - Causes and treatment (Walla system)

Do you also refer to sleep as a time when the brain rests and fills its energy stores?

The truth is that when we sleep, in practice the exact opposite happens.

In the last twenty years, researchers have discovered, through advanced scans and simulations, that precisely when we are asleep, our brain is very active, although the world of science still does not fully understand what exactly is happening in it at this time.



What can be said is that during sleep, the brain arranges the information it has collected throughout the day, gets rid of what it does not need, eliminates toxins and corrects itself.

This is a time when we "file" important information from today and store it in long-term memory.

That is why sleep is so important for learning, memory and in general for maintaining the healthy health of the important organ in our body.

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Penelope Lewis is a neuroscience specialist at Cardiff University in Wales.

When she was a guest at an online conference of the British magazine New Scientist, she told about studies she has conducted and is currently conducting.

During the years she performed manipulations on the brain waves of sleep subjects, in order to influence their brain activity.

Following this unconventional work she strives to understand how it is possible, quite easily, to affect the memory of us all and even reduce the risk of developing incurable neurological diseases like dementia.

How does brain activity affect sleep?

Gif of the brain while sleeping (Photo: Giphy)

To understand these studies, it is first of all important to understand in a big way how our brain works.

You may already know that communication in the brain is carried out by neurons that "shoot" at each other electrical signals, in patterns that are very reminiscent of sound waves.

Therefore, in her work Lewis examines whether sounds can be used, or rather "closed-ended voice stimuli," to have a positive effect on the brain activity of us all.

Simple sounds may rewire the brain

By then we already understood that sleep has a tremendous effect on brain activity - but we are not sure we have internalized to the end how essential it is.

Researchers today know for example that the brain itself cleanses toxins that increase the risk of diseases such as dementia.

They also know that during sleep, the rate of detoxification inside it doubles.

And ironically, as we get older, our sleep becomes shorter and less quality on average.



According to Lewis, her work shows that as you get older, there is a decrease during the time that sleep is deep and quality.

However, as mentioned, she believes that the picture can certainly be changed through what she calls "sleep engineering".

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For the benefit of her latest research, she recruited subjects who volunteered to sleep while connected to EEG devices that document electrical activity in the brain. The documentation is done in the subjects' homes, with the researchers monitoring the activity online and remotely. In the second stage, Lewis and her team mapped the subjects' brainwave activity and tried to identify patterns in them that could be influenced. "We actually make simple sounds, at precise times when certain fluctuations are recorded in brain activity, to affect the brain waves," she explained at the conference.



This research of hers is still ongoing, but Lewis is definitely optimistic and believes it will help find out how to use sounds to improve brain health in sleep. And judging by her past experience, she can certainly be optimistic. Her previous study, published in March 2021, showed that the same technique can help reduce sleep anxiety and even benefit post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) sufferers.



According to her, this effect is usually more powerful in young people and decreases as they get older, but in the current study she will try to find a way to "engineer" more effectively even older minds.

Is it possible to engineer the brain?

Brain scan in a sleep lab (Photo: ShutterStock)

Link sounds to information you want to capture

Lewis's research is still ongoing and she has not yet released the sounds she is working with, or even other sounds she has examined in previous studies. However, a quick search on Google and YouTube will help you find such sounds - which we can not assess if they are really effective.



But Lewis still wants to help you improve your brain function - and highlights again what we already know - how important it is to sleep in order to learn and remember new information. This means that if you have a big test in the morning, it is better that you go to bed at a normal time and do not study until the wee hours of the night - with anxiety and binge eating attacks that are likely to accompany this devastating marathon. "The data show that people perform much better on tests if they sleep properly," she said. "During the night there is a dramatic improvement in learning - a much more significant improvement than that recorded between morning and evening."



And if you want to further enhance your memory and learning abilities, she unsurprisingly recommends using sounds.

To do this, Lewis suggests making certain sounds when you are learning important information or experiencing something you want to remember and cherish.

Then, make the same sounds as you sleep.

"Such a process activates the memory preservation in the brain and crystallizes it in the brain for a long time," she said.



Exactly how long?

Lewis estimates that such memories are preserved for an average of ten days - and are expected to fade completely after about twenty days of unused use.

But that's not all.

She also emphasizes that this action has an additional contribution to the brain - and is much more important.

"It increases the gray matter in the brain for a period of about ten days, which can have a long-term effect on functional, structural and behavioral changes in the brain - and it's pretty amazing."

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Source: walla

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