An 'artificial sleep machine' looks like a possibility for the not too distant future thanks to research carried out recently by a team of Italian sleep scientists in the United States.
The team has discovered that the short brain waves that characterise deep sleep, and which enable the brain to recover from one day's activity and prepare for the next, can be generated at will.
Achieving this requires the use of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), a technique which stimulates the brain with electromagnetic waves.
TMS has been used successfully in the US to deal with depression and is seen as a promising strategy for other pathologies too.
Giulio Tononi, a top neuro-psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has recently experimented with a version of the technology altered to reproduce the short waves of deep sleep.
When Tononi stimulated the brains of sleeping volunteers in this way, their brains pretty soon began spontaneously producing the regenerative short waves by themselves.
Deep sleep, with its short brain waves, normally accounts for about 20% of the time when a person is asleep at night. REM sleep, when dreaming take place and waves are fast, accounts for another 20%. The rest is mostly non-REM 'shallow' sleep in which brainwaves are slow.
Tononi still has to demonstrate that his artificially induced deep sleep is as good for the brain as the natural type. If it is, then he believes TMS could become an effective instrument against insomnia.
Another more controversial application could be to use the technique on extremely busy people who have 'no time' for a full night's sleep and want to squeeze in the essential deep sleep in the least time possible.
