Dr. Matt Walker

However, if you look at that paper, and here's why I think the first method may not have worked very well and why I don't suggest people start trying to set this up themselves.

When they kept stimulating the brain, slow wave after slow wave, after about 30...

three or four strikes of the metronome to boost those slow waves, the benefits stopped.

And if they kept going, you started to inhibit the amount of naturally occurring deep sleep brainwaves.

Why would it do this?

Deep sleep brainwaves, I told you in the first episode, are a act of incredible neural coordination.

It's mass coordination.

Now, one of the extreme versions of mass coordinated propagated activity that is maladaptive, that is pathological, is called an epileptic seizure.

And your brain has in place for the most part, stop gaps to prevent that type of spread of vast amounts of coordinated spontaneous electrical oscillations, because the brain is such a conductive device that once you get it going, you've got to be careful because it may start to conduct out of control.

So we think that these checks and balances that were in place, even though you can artificially stimulate it for a while, after a while, the brain says,

You've got to back off for a while because this is getting a little bit out of control.

You do a breath pause and then you restart again and you get the benefit and then you breath pause.

So you've got to do it a little bit intimately.

Now you've got to read the, what we call the supplemental materials of that paper.

You've got to go, it's like the fine print on a legal document.

If you dig into it, you can see that that was the case, but it wasn't necessarily evident.

So those were really the data on acoustic stimulation.

And now with this closed loop acoustic stimulation that we've got going on, it seems to provide these nice benefits.

Some people then will probably be asking, what about these noise machines?

What about white noise, etc.