Scientists Create Lullabies From Brain Waves

Lord Custos writes "From ABC News: Your Brain Waves are Better than Sleeping Pills! Everyone has a song in them...literally. And you can use it to put yourself to sleep. Canadian scientists have discovered that deep sleep can be induced in insomniacs by copying the insomniacs brainwaves, turning it into 'music', and then playing this 'audio transcription' of their own sleep brainwave pattern back to them."

Comments

AutoZen

[sheol]

take a look at this software project AutoZen.

from their site: "AutoZen is a software 'brain machine' for Linux. It generates sounds that are meant to cause the brain to temporarily shift to a different dominant frequency and cause the user to experience an altered state of consciousness. It is similar to the devices seen in the 'Sharper Image' catalog and in magazine ads, but the price is a lot more attractive!"

Didjeridus

[jukal]

I quess australian aboriginals have knewn this for long. Have you ever heard someone really good play a didjeridu (didgeridoo)? Have sleeping problems? Our first son had some, then one day, we put the didjeridu cassette in the player, and not just our boy, but rest of the family felt asleep in a matter of minutes. If you have never heard with it sounds like, here is some samples. If brain waves don't sound like that, I am amazed ;))

Re:Didjeridus

[blastedtokyo]

Next time read the article.

'The participants showed dramatic improvement over placebo participants who listened to someone else's brain music instead of their own.

"For the placebo group, the improvement was only about 15 percent as compared to 75 to 85 percent for the experimental group. So it's a highly significant statistical difference,"'

In other words, you need to listen to your own brainwaves, not some random noise or someone else's rhythms.

Implications

[prockcore]

I wonder if I can

cat /proc/kcore | /dev/dsp

to put my computer to sleep.

Re:Implications

[JamesSharman]

I don't know about that but:

cat /dev/dsp > /proc/kcore

Will definetly work! :-)

This must be an advertisement

[ndogg]

What better place than here to find insomniacs?

Cowboy Neal is obviously no exception to the rule:
"Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday August 29, @02:15AM"

Addiction.

[jericho4.0]

from the end of the article: "And here's the neat part. It won't become addictive. There won't be any serious side effects, like those caused by various medications that are now available." It seems to me that it could addictive. Many addictions result from the body lowering production of naturally ocuring substances because it's being replaced with the addictive substance. Remove the substance and you go into withdrawl. Who's to say that, over time, the brain wouldn't lose the ability to generate these patterns naturally? People noted the simularity of music and brain waves a long time ago. I bet with hi-fi equipment we could pull out some very cool sounding stuff. - it would be interesting to transcribe brain waves of anger/sex/high states.

Hebb's principle

[xant]

Assuming that the pattern of brain activity is always roughly the same when you're trying to fall asleep, this follows logically from a tenet of biological psychology called Hebb's principle. It states that when two neurons fire together, the connection between them is strengthened.

To explain, I'm going to invent a symbology. X,Y,Z, and K represent neurons in different regions of the brain. I'll create an arbitrary pattern that represents when each of those neurons fire. Let's say that as you fall asleep you normally have a pattern like: XYZYYKKZXK. (I intentionally avoided using A, B, C here for the musical connotations therein.) Let's say it's mapped into music now:
XYZYYKKZXK (neurons firing)->
ABCBBGGCAG (notes played)

When you hear the note A, a particular region of your auditory centers is activated. When you hear B, a slightly different region is activated, and so on. Coincidentally, a lot of your auditory processing takes place in your brain stem, which is also where a lot of sleep-related functions take place, such as shutting down the body's muscles so you don't sleepwalk every night, but this coincidence isn't necessary for this explanation to work.

So you listen to your personalized auditory mapping and attempt to fall asleep. Because you're trying to fall asleep, even if you're insomniac, neurons for X will be a little more likely to fire, then neurons for Y, then Z, and so on. At the same time, neurons for A are firing, then B, then C.

According to Hebb, the synchonicity of these events will cause a physical connection between the neurons to strengthen, regardless of how much neural distance separates them. All the neurons in between will get activated a little bit, and the more they fire together, the more the entire system of connections becomes stronger. You've directly mapped sleep waves into music, so the synchronicity will be very strong. Consequently, the connection between the auditory centers and your sleep centers will get stronger very quickly.

Make that connection strong enough, and you will eventually be able to cause XYZK to fire by playing ABCG, in essence sending a message to your brain stem via your speakers. Do this long enough, and the feedback may go in the other direction as well: you may start to hear the music every time you fall asleep, regardless of whether it's actually playing.

Theoretically this would work by mapping those brain waves into just about anything you can perceive, not just sound, although it may work better with sound. For example, mapping it into images would certainly work; you could take the entire discussion above, replace "auditory centers" with "visual centers", and you get the same explanation.