Dr. Matt Walker

So what they did was then they started to manipulate these peripheral regions sort of.

And sure enough, when they did this, they were able to have individuals fall asleep 25% faster.

And these were healthy individuals who are normally sleeping within a very natural, quick period of time.

but they were able to lop off 25% of that time simply by warming these certain parts of the brain to lift the blood away from the core of the body.

And by doing that, they accelerated the temperature core deceleration and therefore increased or accelerated the speed with which sleep arrived to those individuals.

Sleep appeared with much greater alacrity than it would have done otherwise, even though it was quick anyway.

So them not being satisfied with that, they moved on to the deep sleep trigger zone.

And this isn't, you need to stay cool to stay asleep.

And here now, they started to just continue to cool the core, the central aspects of the body.

what they were able to do is increase the amount of deep sleep by somewhere between 25 to, look at some of the data, almost 40 minutes, they were able to boost the amount of deep sleep with the thermal manipulation.

And when they were measuring the electrical brainwaves and they decompose those brainwaves, even the power and the electrical quality of those slow waves was increased, very impressive too.

Next, not being satisfied with that, they turned to older adults for the reasons that we've just described.

What they found was that in those older adults, when they were not manipulated with this thermal temperature, in the second half of the night, there was a 50% probability that they were going to be awake for some part of the second half of the night.

When they did the thermal manipulation, they dropped that number down to 5%.

So they reduced a 50% probability of waking up down to 5% in older adults.

And again, they improved the quality of their deep sleep.

Think about, by the way, why that was so effective for older adults.

I guarantee you, you've probably seen, you've been in a warm climate or you've been down on the beach, you know, here sort of in Los Angeles.

And people are out in shorts and T-shirts or crop tops.

And then occasionally there will be someone, and I love seeing these sites where, you know, a child is sort of wheeling along their elderly parents, a beautiful sort of scene of caring.