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May 18, 2007
Power Nap Device In Development
Do you have trouble getting a good night's sleep? University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers are working on a gadget that can help you.Dr. Giulio Tononi, professor of psychiatry at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health is working on a device that uses transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to stimulate the slow brain waves characteristic of deep sleep.
TMS sends a harmless magnetic pulse through your skull to alter brain activity. In experiments, sleeping volunteers immediately began reproducing the slow, deep waves seen in Stage Three and Stage Four sleep.
I can't decide if this is just the coolest thing I've seen in a while, or if it's the scariest thing on Earth! There are few more sensitive areas of the human body than the brain, so randomly sending a magnetic pulse into it is sort of unnerving, but the effects are extremely impressive. I personally have spent weeks never getting past stage two sleep especially when I'm under a lot of stress. So the idea that I could force my brain into deeper more restful sleep is extremely interesting and with research showing that memory is dramatically effected by sleep it definitely would be something worth looking into.
Of course my first thought on reading is if you can switch the brain into different brain wave states with this technology, what's to keep you from setting up an Alpha wave state? I know people like me find it next to impossible to meditate, but if you could shock our brains into the right state, maybe we would be able to get back there at some future date. And don't say try Tai Chi, I still have post traumatic stress from trying to learn Tai Chi. My poor teachers were stunned, they'd never seen anyone made worse off by taking Tai Chi before. Unfortunately it appeared that it caused some sort of stress feedback loop for me. Amusingly the positions have never left my brain for some reason, I've shown them to Alexis and she seems to have a much greater grasp of the notion than I do, go figure, but she has the advantage of not yet being aware of the entire world.
Anyway, I think this technology could be really cool, it would be nice to push the mind into the proper state for whatever situation you needed it to be in.
Read more over at Live Science.
Posted by Jamison at May 18, 2007 11:44 AM
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