Dr. Matt Walker

Don't worry, I'll keep it PG again.

And then the next thing that they did was connect a rotating arm to that bed at the side of the bed.

And that arm would start to simply just push the bed laterally from left to right, left to right.

And they started just swinging the bed in a very controlled manner.

But here, and I should ask Sophie exactly why they made this choice.

They were rotating the bed, not at this sort of around one Hertz, which is what we'd done with electrical stimulation or acoustic stimulation.

They were doing it at 0.25 hertz, which is much slower still.

Almost imperceptibly.

That is rocking, you know, once every four seconds.

It's a very slow lull.

And sure enough, what they found in the first series of studies, they did a nap study, a 90-minute nap study.

When you did this rocking motion versus when the bed was still, they increased the speed with which people fell asleep.

They boosted the amount of deep sleep and they boosted the amount of those sleep spindle oscillations that we described.

Not satisfied, they then said, well, what happens across a night of sleep?

They did it then across a night of sleep.

They replicated the same findings and now they got a memory benefit.

Now the memory benefit you could argue is modest.

It was 10% of a memory improvement benefit when you woke up from sleep relative to the already sizable benefit that sleep naturally gives when you're not rocking the bed.

But you think, well, 10%, if I were, let's say a student and I got, you know, a B and someone, the professor said, look, by the way, there is something that you can do and we can increase your grade by 10% and you can get to an A or an A plus depending on the grading system.

Would you take it?