14 DAY TRIAL // All it would take to get a good night's sleep would be to flip the switch of a device, and let magnetic waves guide us to Dreamland.
Most mammals, birds, fish, as well as invertebrates such as the fruitfly Drosophila sleep. The state is characterized by a reduction in voluntary body movement, temporary blindness, decreased reaction to external stimuli, an increased rate of anabolism (the synthesis of cell structures), and a decreased rate of catabolism (the breakdown of cell structures). In humans, mammals and many other animals which have been studied, such as fish, birds, mice, ants and fruitflies, regular sleep is necessary for survival.
The capability for arousal from sleep is a protective mechanism and also necessary for health and survival. Although humans can't function properly without sleep, nobody knows how sleep restores the brain.
Giulio Tononi, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, has discovered how to stimulate brain waves that characterize the deepest stage of sleep. The discovery could open a new window into the role of sleep in keeping humans healthy, happy and able to learn.
Called slow wave activity, the stage of sleep in question is extremely important to the restoration of mood and the ability to learn, think and remember. It occupies around 80 percent of the total sleeping hours, and during that time, waves of electrical activity wash across the brain, roughly once a second, 1,000 times a night.
Tononi and his colleagues used a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to initiate slow waves in sleeping volunteers. The researchers recorded brain electrical activity with an electroencephalograph (EEG). By locating the device in a specific part of the brain, it causes slow waves that travel throughout the brain.
"We don't know why, but this is a very good place to evoke big waves that clearly travel through every part of the brain," Tononi says. "We have reasons to think the slow waves are not just something that happens, but that they may be important [in sleep's restorative powers]."
The results were promising, and future applications could be used to treat insomnia, or the rare genetic disorder Morvan's fibrillary chorea or Morvan's syndrome, that can make people go without sleep for several months at a time, with no apparent negative side-effects.