Dr. Mathias Basner
speaker
82 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 11 Feb
Dr. Mathias Basner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
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Well, the thing is that my whole scientific career, I've been researching how noise affects sleep in a bad way, like traffic noise, for example, a plane flying over your house.
or a car driving by your house, and then that sound intruding into your bedroom.
So when I learned that some people would put moist sources into their bedroom to promote or help them sleep better, I said, that can't be true.
That doesn't make sense.
So that got me curious, and I started looking into it more.
And yes, there are reasons why it could help, and the main reason is masking, right?
So if you have a constant background noise level and there's a noise intruding into your bedroom,
The constant background noise, you know, may just mask the other noise event.
You may not be able to perceive it anymore, and then you can't react to it.
So that kind of makes sense.
But it could also be harmful to sleep itself.
It could actually be harmful to hearing, you know, in the long run because our auditory system needs to recover from the strains of the day.
The best time for doing that is the night.
And obviously, it could also mask sounds that we do want to hear, like, you know, your toddler crying in the next room or a fire alarm.
So, you know, we actually did a systematic review of the literature and we found that, you know, the quality of the science out there is really bad.
Handful of studies, very small, mostly just asking people, which is always a problem with sleep because we're typically unconscious.
We're not really aware of what's happening to us.
And that's when we said, you know, okay, we can't really conclude anything.
We can't say it's good.
We can't say it's bad.
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