How to get a better night's sleep by hacking your brainwaves

 Since you need deep sleep, it is your doctor's responsibility to get this for you.

How to get a better night's sleep by hacking your brainwaves

Wearable technology that stimulates the brain to make you sleep more deeply promises to revolutionise your slumber – can it really lead to a better night’s rest?

By Graham Lawton

22 November 2023

Ana Yael

WE ALL know the awful hangover from a bad night’s sleep: tiredness, crotchetiness, poor concentration and sluggish reactions. Thankfully, these can all be fixed by catching up on your zzz’s the following day, but if sleep continues to evade you, trouble is coming. Chronic insomnia can lead to severe health problems, including obesity, type 2 diabetes and depression.

Such a lack of rest is a major issue. The amount of sleep people need varies, with most adults requiring between 7 and 9 hours each night. But a lot of us fail to hit that target on a regular basis. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about a third of US adults don’t get enough every day, and around 20 per cent have chronic sleep conditions.

“Sleep is such a problem,” says Mark George at the Medical University of South Carolina. “It would be great if we had some kind of device that would help people.”

Of course, there is no shortage of apps and gadgets that claim to monitor and analyse your sleep, but after decades of mixed results, recent breakthroughs in brain stimulation are about to take things a step further. A range of products that directly interact with your brainwaves are promising to help hack your sleep for a better night’s rest. But can they really live up to their potential?

The first stirrings of “consumer sleep technology” arrived in 2005, when a company called Zeo launched a headband that purported to record and analyse sleep and give advice on how to improve it. Zeo was ahead of its time and folded around 2012, but, by then, …

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Improving Deep Sleep May Prevent Dementia

 With your risk of dementia post stroke, what is your doctor's protocol to consistently get you to deep sleep?

Your chances of getting dementia.

1. A documented 33% dementia chance post-stroke from an Australian study?   May 2012.

2. Then this study came out and seems to have a range from 17-66%. December 2013.`    

3. A 20% chance in this research.   July 2013.

4. Dementia Risk Doubled in Patients Following Stroke September 2018 

The latest here:

Improving Deep Sleep May Prevent Dementia

Enhancing or maintaining deep sleep, also known as slow wave sleep, in older years could prevent dementia, according to a study published in JAMA Neurology.

“Slow-wave sleep, or deep sleep, supports the aging brain in many ways, and we know that sleep augments the clearance of metabolic waste from the brain, including

facilitating the clearance of proteins that aggregate in Alzheimer’s disease,” said Matthew Pase, PhD, Monash University, Victoria, Australia. “However, to date, we have been unsure of the role of slow-wave sleep in the development of dementia.”

For the study, Jayandra Himali, PhD, University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, Texas, and colleagues looked at 346 participants with a mean age of 69 years who were enrolled in the Framingham Heart Study. The patients completed 2 overnight sleep studies within the time periods 1995 to 1998 and 2001 to 2003, with an average of 5 years between the 2 studies.

These participants were then carefully followed for dementia from the time of the second sleep study through 2018.

The researchers found that, on average, the amount of deep sleep declined between the 2 studies, indicating slow wave sleep loss with aging. Over 17 years of follow-up, there were 52 cases of dementia. Even after adjusting for age, sex, cohort, genetic factors, smoking status, sleeping medication use, antidepressant use, and anxiolytic use, each percentage decrease in deep sleep per year was associated with a 27% increase in the risk of dementia.

“We also examined whether genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease or brain volumes suggestive of early neurodegeneration were associated with a reduction in slow-wave sleep,” said Dr. Pase. “We found that a genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, but not brain volume, was associated with accelerated declines in slow wave sleep.”

“Our findings suggest that slow wave sleep loss may be a modifiable dementia risk factor,” he concluded.

Reference: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/article-abstract/2810957

SOURCE: Monash University

Scientists Discover A Link Between Lack Of Deep Sleep And Alzheimer's Disease

So while at the hospital your doctor needs to monitor your sleep to make sure you get to deep sleep. I'm not sure sleeping pills do that. THIS IS YOUR DOCTOR'S RESPONSIBILITY! 

For these reasons:

Your chances of getting dementia.

1. A documented 33% dementia chance post-stroke from an Australian study?   May 2012.

2. Then this study came out and seems to have a range from 17-66%. December 2013.

3. A 20% chance in this research.   July 2013.

4. Dementia Risk Doubled in Patients Following Stroke September 2018

 

Scientists Discover A Link Between Lack Of Deep Sleep And Alzheimer's Disease

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November 16, 20203:47 PM ET

Heard on All Things Considered

Jon Hamilton

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There's growing evidence that a lack of deep sleep increases the risk of Alzheimer's disease. Scientists say that's because during deep sleep, the brain removes toxins associated with Alzheimer's.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

We continue to learn about the connection between sleep and Alzheimer's disease. NPR's Jon Hamilton brings us this report done with the NPR science podcast Short Wave.

JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: There's growing evidence that people who don't sleep well are more likely to develop Alzheimer's. Matthew Walker at the University of California, Berkeley, says that's no coincidence.

MATTHEW WALKER: We are now learning that there is a significant relationship between sleep and dementia, particularly Alzheimer's disease.

HAMILTON: Walker says the strongest evidence involves deep sleep. That's a time when dreams are rare, body temperature drops and the brain produces slow, rhythmic electrical waves.

WALKER: There is something about this deep sleep that is helping protect you against amyloid buildup in the brain.

HAMILTON: Amyloid or beta amyloid is a substance that forms sticky clumps in the brains of people who are likely to develop Alzheimer's. So Walker had a question.

WALKER: Can I look into your future and can I accurately estimate how much beta amyloid you're going to accumulate over the next two years, the next four years, the next six years, simply on the basis of your sleep tonight?

HAMILTON: To find out, Walker and a team studied 32 older adults who had taken part in a sleep study. None had memory problems. The scientists used brain scans to track levels of beta amyloid in each participant for up to six years. And Walker says the results, published early this month in the journal Current Biology, showed people who got less deep sleep had more beta amyloid.

WALKER: We have a specific sleep signature right now that seems to help us better understand where you may sit on the Alzheimer's disease risk trajectory in the future.

HAMILTON: Scientists also have some ideas about why deep sleep can reduce amyloid. In 2013, a study of mice found that their brains switched on a sort of dishwasher during sleep. Laura Lewis, a biomedical engineer at Boston University, says that appears to clear out waste products.

LAURA LEWIS: So things like amyloid beta, which are implicated in Alzheimer's disease, seem to actually be removed more rapidly from the brain when an animal is asleep versus when they're awake.

HAMILTON: In 2019, Lewis led a team that showed how this dishwasher works in people.

LEWIS: We realized that there's these waves of fluid flowing into the brain during sleep.

HAMILTON: What's more, each wave of fluid was preceded by a large, slow electrical wave. So now scientists are looking for ways to induce the slow waves that signal deep sleep. Lewis says it's easy in rodents.

LEWIS: There's a specific deep brain structure that if you stimulate it, you can cause these sleeplike slow waves in the brain.

HAMILTON: There's some evidence that rhythmic sounds can increase slow waves in people. And researchers at Washington University in St. Louis showed that treating a sleep disorder also helped. Dr. Yo-El Ju was part of a team that studied patients with sleep apnea.

YO-EL JU: They seem to have a change in their ability to clear proteins or, you know, waste products from their brain. And people with obstructive sleep apnea are at higher risk for dementia down the line.

HAMILTON: So Ju's team looked to see what happened after treatment allowed better sleep. The result - more deep sleep and more beta amyloid cleared from the brain. And Ju says there was another effect - participants' brains began making less beta amyloid.

JU: So I don't know whether it's that sleep increases clearance or whether sleep decreases the production of waste products.

HAMILTON: Either way, Ju says sleep is important to brain health, though on the day we spoke, she hadn't gotten that much.

JU: My 2-year-old decided to sleep in my bed and eat a tortilla and a banana at 2 in the morning. But usually, I get a pretty good sleep.

HAMILTON: Including plenty of deep sleep.

Jon Hamilton, NPR News.

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Slow-Wave Sleep Suspends Alzheimer's Build-Up

 What is your doctor's sleep protocol to ensure you get this slow wave sleep? Is deep sleep the same as slow wave sleep?

How Deep Sleep May Help The Brain Clear Alzheimer's Toxins November 2019

Can you get to slow wave sleep with sleeping pills? They were handed out like candy at 10pm at my stroke hospital.

Slow-Wave Sleep Suspends Alzheimer's Build-Up 

SLEEP VIDEO:

See what kind of sleep fights Alzheimer's and lowers its risk. Watch Harvard Alzheimer's expert Dr. Rudy Tanzi and bestselling author Dr. Deepak Chopra offer up the latest research.

---

Dr. Rudolph Tanzi is Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Director of Genetics Aging Research at Massachusetts General. Dr. Tanzi is also one of the world's foremost experts on the causes of Alzheimer's. Dr. Chopra is a physician and bestselling author.

In this video, get tips and ideas on how to achieve better sleep and help promote brain health. The video is based on their popular book, Super Brain.

Waves of Fluid Bathe the Sleeping Brain, Perhaps to Clear Waste

How is your doctor ensuring that you get enough deep sleep to clear out the garbage in your brain? Does using sleeping pills still allow deep sleep?

Waves of Fluid Bathe the Sleeping Brain, Perhaps to Clear Waste

During deep sleep, rhythmic pulses of cerebrospinal fluid are coupled with slow waves of electrical activity and fluctuating blood levels in the human brain.

Oct 31, 2019

Abby Olena

13.8K

ABOVE: During sleep, waves of fluid surge into the brain and can be visualized with functional MRI. At an earlier timepoint (left), a wave of blood (red) is followed (right) by a pulse of cerebrospinal fluid (blue) into the fourth ventricle.
LAURA LEWIS

While humans sleep, huge waves of the cerebrospinal fluid that envelops the brain rhythmically flow in and out of the organ, according to a new study published today (October 31) in Science. The authors show that these CSF dynamics are connected to slow waves of neuronal activity, which are characteristic of deep sleep, and corresponding oscillations in the brain’s blood volume. Coupled with recent indications that CSF clears waste products from the brain, the findings shed light on the benefits of sleep for the central nervous system.
The work “is exciting because it’s linking neural activity to blood flow and cleaning the brain. Most neuroscientists would not say those are linked,” Maiken Nedergaard, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester Medical Center, tells The Scientist. She did not participate in the study, but work from her group has indicated that CSF helps take out the brain’s garbage.
It was this idea of CSF as a brain wash—combined with recent evidence showing that sleep is important for clearing toxic metabolic waste products from the brain—that led Boston University’s Laura Lewis and colleagues to investigate what CSF does during sleep. For the current study, they designed a new approach combining simultaneous electroencephalograms (EEGs) to measure the brain’s electrical activity and blood oxygen level dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging (BOLD fMRI) to collect blood oxygen levels and the flow of CSF in the brain.
The team recorded neuronal activity, blood levels, and CSF flow in two men and 11 women while they wore caps with EEG electrodes and slept in an fMRI scanner for up to two and a half hours. The researchers knew from previous studies that when people are awake there’s some pulsing of CSF associated with breathing, heart rate, and other motions of the body—a finding they also confirmed in this study. But in their sleeping subjects, they saw large waves of CSF flow into the fourth ventricle of the brain about every 20 seconds. Plus, the CSF dynamics were coupled to the brain’s electrical activity. Specifically, an electrical slow wave and corresponding increase in blood flow was followed a few seconds later by a decrease in blood oxygenation and volume and then a surge of CSF.
“This team has found this wonderful way of measuring these interrelated signals that are implicated heavily in just about every brain disease we know,” says Christopher Moore, a neuroscientist at Brown University who did not participate in the study. It’s possible the relationship between circulatory dynamics, neuronal activity, and CSF flow comes into play in neurological disorders such as stroke and Alzheimer's where the vasculature is known to play a role, he explains. “The clinical potential of this as both a research tool [and] maybe diagnostically is tremendous.”
“We know that electrical slow wave activity declines in aging and declines even more so in neurodegenerative disease,” says Lewis, adding that all of the subjects in the current study are young adults.“We’re working now on trying to understand how these CSF waves are affected across the lifespan and in patient populations.”
Right now, the paper draws a correlation between neural activity, blood flow, and CSF rhythms, Moore adds, so another extension of the work will be to use animal models to manipulate each oscillation and see what happens downstream. An additional question, he says, is “how do all these vascular and CSF dynamics impact neurons? They could be for taking out the garbage, but maybe they’re . . . doing something far more interesting.”
N.E. Fultz et al., “Coupled electrophysiological, hemodynamic, and cerebrospinal fluid oscillations in human sleep,” Science, doi:10.1126/science.aax5440, 2019.
Abby Olena is a freelance journalist based in North Carolina. Find her on Twitter @abbyolena.

How Deep Sleep May Help The Brain Clear Alzheimer's Toxins

Can you get to deep sleep with sleeping pills? They were handed out like candy at 10pm at my stroke hospital. 

How Deep Sleep May Help The Brain Clear Alzheimer's Toxins

October 31, 20193:21 PM ET

Heard on All Things Considered

Jon Hamilton

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The brain waves generated during deep sleep appear to trigger a cleaning system in the brain that protects it against Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases.
Electrical signals known as slow waves appear just before a pulse of fluid washes through the brain, presumably removing toxins associated with Alzheimer's, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Science.
The finding could help explain a puzzling link between sleep and Alzheimer's, says Laura Lewis, an author of the study and an assistant professor in the department of biomedical engineering at Boston University.

The Brain During Sleep

During deep sleep, waves of cerebrospinal fluid (blue) coincide with temporary decreases in blood flow (red). Less blood in the brain means more room for the fluid to carry away toxins, including those associated with Alzheimer's disease.

Credit: Fultz et al., 2019

"Some disruption to the way sleep is working could potentially be contributing to the decline in brain health," Lewis says.
The finding also suggests that people might be able to reduce their risk of Alzheimer's by ensuring that they get high-quality sleep, says William Jagust, a professor of public health and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study.
Scientists are already testing other lifestyle changes, like diet and exercise changes, to protect brain health. And sleep should be "high on the list" of measures worth trying, he says.
The study comes after decades of questions about the link between sleep and Alzheimer's.
Studies show that people with Alzheimer's often have sleep problems. And there's growing evidence that people with sleep problems are more vulnerable to Alzheimer's.

Deep Sleep Helps the Brain Learn

What is your doctors sleep protocol? And does taking sleeping pills count as deep sleep? My sleep was ruined almost every morning by the blood vampires coming around at 7am to take blood from someone in my 4plex.
https://www.rdmag.com/article/2017/05/deep-sleep-helps-brain-learn?et_cid=5961225&

Scientists are closer to understanding why deep sleep is crucial for the brain’s ability to learn efficiently.
Researchers from the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have discovered for the first time the causal context as to why deep sleep is crucial to the learning efficiency of the brain and developed a non-invasive method for modulating deep sleep in a targeted region of the brain.
“We have developed a method that lets us reduce the sleep depth in a certain part of the brain and therefore prove the causal connection between deep sleep and learning efficiency,” Reto Huber, professor at the University Children's Hospital Zurich and of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at UZH, said in a statement.
The researchers focally perturbed deep sleep in the motor cortex, while investigating the consequences on behavioral and neurophysiological markers of neuroplasticity arising from dedicated motor practice. They discovered that the capacity to undergo neuroplastic changes is reduced by wakefulness but restored during unperturbed sleep.
A single sleepless night can lead to difficulty in mastering mental tasks the following day. While we are awake we receive constant impressions of the environment, where synapses—connections between the nerve cells—are excited and intensified at times.
Perpetual increases in synaptic strength would render the brain highly insensitive to new inputs due to neurons losing their ability to fire selectively and synapses could not be further potentiated—saturating neural plasticity. The need for cellular maintenance and the removal of potentially neurotoxic waste would be enhanced, causing an unsustainable level of energy consumption.
According to the study, when slow waves are selectively perturbed in motor cortex, the restorative process is markedly attenuated, showing that deep sleep is a requirement for maintaining sustainable learning efficiency.
The researchers examined six women and seven men, who had to master three different motoric tasks during the study.  The volunteers had their sleep manipulated at times while the researchers localized the part of the brain responsible for learning the finger movements they were tasked with for the control of motor skills.
The researchers were able to learn how the manipulation of deep sleep impacted the motoric learning tasks the next day.
The participants performed well in the morning after a deep sleep but struggled more as the day went on. After sleeping again, the participant’s efficiency increased.  However, after a manipulated sleep performance, difficulties in learning the finger movements was noticeably weaker.
“In the strongly excited region of the brain, learning efficiency was saturated and could no longer be changed, which inhibited the learning of motor skills,” Nicole Wenderoth, a professor in the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at the ETH Zurich, said in a statement. 
According to the study, there is a lack of causal evidence in humans due to the inability to sleep deprive one target area while keeping the natural sleep pattern intact.
“Many diseases manifest in sleep as well, such as epilepsy,” Huber said. “Using the new method, we hope to be able to manipulate those specific brain regions that are directly connected with the disease.”
The study was published in Nature Communications.   

How the brain consolidates memory during deep sleep

Does your doctor even know if you are getting to deep sleep? It seems very likely we need this for our recovery, consolidating the memories of movements recovered. What is your sleep protocol?
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-04-brain-memory-deep.html

Research strongly suggests that sleep, which constitutes about a third of our lives, is crucial for learning and forming long-term memories. But exactly how such memory is formed is not well understood and remains, despite considerable research, a central question of inquiry in neuroscience.

Neuroscientists at the University of California, Riverside report this week in the Journal of Neuroscience that they now may have an answer to this question. Their study provides for the first time a mechanistic explanation for how deep sleep (also called slow-wave sleep) may be promoting the consolidation of recent memories.
During sleep, human and animal brains are primarily decoupled from sensory input. Nevertheless, the brain remains highly active, showing electrical activity in the form of sharp-wave ripples in the hippocampus (a small region of the brain that forms part of the limbic system) and large-amplitude slow oscillations in the cortex (the outer layer of the cerebrum), reflecting alternating periods of active and silent states of cortical neurons during deep sleep. Traces of episodic memory acquired during wakefulness and initially stored in the hippocampus are progressively transferred to the cortex as long-term memory during sleep.
Using a computational model, the UC Riverside researchers provide a link between electrical activity in the brain during deep sleep and synaptic connections between neurons. They show that patterns of slow oscillations in the cortex, which their model spontaneously generates, are influenced by the hippocampal sharp-wave ripples and that these patterns of slow oscillations determine synaptic changes in the cortex. (Change in synaptic strength is widely believed to underlie learning and memory storage in the brain.) The model shows that the synaptic changes, in turn, affect the patterns of slow oscillations, promoting a kind of reinforcement and replay of specific firing sequences of the cortical neurons - representing a replay of specific memory.
"These patterns of slow oscillations remain even without further input from the hippocampus," said Yina Wei, a postdoctoral researcher and the first author of the research paper. "We interpret these results as a mechanistic explanation for the consolidation of specific memories during deep sleep, whereby the memory traces are formed in the cortex and become independent of the hippocampus."
Study results appear in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Wei explained that according to the biologically realistic network model the researchers used, input from the hippocampus reaches the cortex during deep sleep and influences how the slow oscillations are initiated and propagated in the cortical network.
"Input from the hippocampus - the sharp-wave ripples - determines the spatial and temporal pattern of these slow oscillations," she said. "By influencing the nature of these oscillations, this hippocampal input activates selective memories during deep sleep and causes a replay of specific memories. During such memory replay, the corresponding synapses are strengthened for long-term storage in the cortex. These results suggest the importance of the hippocampal sharp-wave ripple events in transferring memory information to the cortex."
Normal sleep, during which brain activity remains high, is made up of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. NREM and REM sleep alternate in each of the 4-5 cycles during an eight-hour sleep period. Each cycle consists of NREM sleep followed by REM sleep, and roughly lasts 90-110 minutes. NREM sleep has three stages, Stage 3 being deep sleep. Deep sleep, which makes up at least 20 percent of a person's total sleep time, occurs mostly in the first third of the night.
"In our model, even weak and spatially localized input from the hippocampus influenced the spatiotemporal pattern of slow oscillations and led to a persistent change of synaptic efficacy between neurons," Wei said. "Further, our model makes predictions that can be tested experimentally, including specific interventions to suppress or augment memory consolidation processes."

Explore further: Where and what is happening in your brain when you sleep?

More information: Synaptic Mechanisms of Memory Consolidation during Sleep Slow Oscillations, The Journal of Neuroscience, 13 April 2016, 36(15): 4231-4247; DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3648-15.2016 , http://www.jneurosci.org/content/36/15/4231.short

Journal reference: Journal of Neuroscience
Provided by: University of California - Riverside