Dr. Matt Walker

Closed loop here simply means that I'm not going to just wait until you go into deep sleep and then just take a chance and start stimulating your brain, not knowing of the synchrony of my pulses into your brain, right?

relative to the brain waves that you're experiencing.

Closed loop does do that.

So what I'm doing is I'm measuring the electrical brain waves that are occurring.

And because they're nice and slow, they're very predictable.

And I can program my algorithm and my brain stimulation machine to say, I'm going to wait and wait.

And as soon as you are on this peak of your slow wave, it turns out to be the negative trough, but I'll forego that.

we then try to strike at that point of midnight when you're going through the biggest sort of powerful sort of dip in the brainwave and we're trying to sort of enhance it and same with the peak.

So this is where we get a stimulus from the brain, your electrical brain activity, and then we create a timed response.

So it's a stimulus response, it's a call and response loop.

And by way of doing that, it's a much smarter, specific method than a more generalized, I'm just going to stimulate and hope I catch those waves at the peaks.

The reason is important because different people have different speeds of their slow brainwaves.

They're all slow, but your speed of brainwave may be a little bit different to mine.

And if I'm off with my stimulation by, let's say, just half a second or a quarter of a second time and time again, I may be leaving some benefit on the table.

But closed-loop stimulation creates this personalized electrical prescription of stimulation.

And when you do that, you get very reliable benefits.

You can boost those deep-sleep brainwaves.

You get the memory benefits.

But also what we found is you not only boost those deep-sleep brainwaves, you boost another electrical signature that I spoke about in the first episode called sleep spindles.

And it seems to be the combination of those two things by way of electrical stimulation that provides the benefits.