Pink Noise Can Improve Sleep and Memory in Seniors

Sound Essential in Assisting to Get Good Sleep

The sounds of rushing water of a waterfall, the regular beating of a heart or the sound of rain are usually found in white noise machines which have been designed to assist babies to fall asleep. According to a new Northwestern University research, sound is said to be an essential element in assisting us to eventually get into a good night’s sleep.

Moreover, it also tends to develop memories. As per a study published recently in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, a simple non-invasive, non-medical safe and economical means of getting a much improved sleep at night is to play some pink noise. Pink noise is said to have lesser octaves when compared to typical white noise and is not much soothing. For instance, it could be one-second pulses of the sound of rushing waterfall.

The small parts of quiet, quick sounds would tend to be disturbing should one decide to fall asleep.. However, the pink sound is not attempting to get one to fall asleep but would attempt to put you into a deep slumber wherein one would have slow brainwaves. This is said to be one of our deepest means of sleep which tends to weaken in the case of aging adults.

Sound Therapy – Quality over Quantity

According to Nelly Papalambros, a PhD student at Northwestern University as well as the first author on the work, states that when one plays the pulses at specific times at the stage of deep sleep, it tends to lead to an enhancement of the electrical signal, leading to essentially more of a synchronization of the neurons.

The pulses are said to be timed to correspond with the entry into slow wave sleep. They tend to sound to similar beat as the brainwaves and are inclined to increase the efficiency of your valued as well as elusive deep sleep. The relaxed wave sleep is dangerous for retention associated or essentially, your capability in incorporating new material studied during the day with old material as well as memories.

The sound therapy is not about actually sleeping deeply for longer period but about quality over quantity. One may not be quite rested yet would be remembering more. The researchers observed only the older adults in the age group of 60 plus and had 13 volunteers and did a memory test at night.

Word Association Recall Test

The procedure seemed to be quite simple wherein they attempted to memorize associated words such as oil and energy, or marriage and altar. They were then tested to check how much of it they had recalled before they had dropped off to sleep. The next day the participants were once again tested to see how well they had recalled their training from the previous night.

The word association recall test scores seemed to be thrice better if the participants had the pulses while sleeping than if they had a fake treatment. The team that had obtained the fake treatment seemed to have the same sleep routine and did not get the faint pulses of sound when they had been in the stage of slow wave deep.

The reason to consider older adults was because as one tends to age, sleep seems to become more broken. One does not seem to have much slow wave sleep which then leads to memory loss.