Sleep Science: Northwest Pacific Researchers Explore Secrets of a Good Night’s Rest

Early prototypes of any technology can be a little tricky. Just ask Sofia Fluke, a test engineer at the Eugene Brain Electrophysiology Laboratory.

She sits hunched over her desk with a small, orange flat-blade screwdriver, trying to put the lid back on the deck-sized electronics case.

The screw sways as she turns it.

“It turns out easily if you’re not very, very slow,” she says. “It’s a very delicate process because we did all this ourselves.”

The electronics case contains the brains of a new device called VISP - or Wireless Interface Sensor Pod.

His “do it yourself” origins are pretty obvious. The case attaches to something that looks like a headlight strip. The wire electrodes hang from the side, and the others are placed in a bag with a zipper on the front.

Despite the inelegance of this early design, the technology itself is anything but.

VISP has the potential to change the way we think about sleep.

A gaping hole of sleepless nights

VISP is a headband designed to be worn while sleeping. Use brain waves to give you a better night’s rest.

One in five people in the United States suffers from chronic sleep problems, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And for many of them - including new parents, night shift workers, soldiers and almost everyone as old - VISP could ultimately provide relief from sleep deprivation and sleep disorders.

“Earlier, we thought that the need for sleep was something we could reduce or overcome. But really in the last few decades, we’ve begun to realize how important that is, “said neurologist Miranda Lim of the University of Health and Science in Oregon.

And it doesn’t just matter how long we sleep. Quality is important.

“Pharmaceutical companies have been looking for this ‘magic pill’ or ‘Holy Grail’ for decades. “They have drugs that prolong the total duration of sleep, but many of them have side effects,” she said. “They don’t deal with sleep quality.”

The goal of Lima and the team at BEL is to use VISP to influence the sleep phase known as “deep sleep” or slow wave sleep.

“Sleep scientists, for many years, believe that the sleep phase, which is the most restorative sleep phase with slow waves, is a dream you usually see in the first half of the night as soon as your head hits the pillow,” Lim said.

Brain waves are usually chaotic. Neurons are activated in different parts of your brain as you talk, move, dream and solve problems. It is a purposeful cacophony. But during deep sleep, your brain waves slow down and synchronize, pulsing in slow oscillations.

VISP detects when your brain is just beginning to enter deep sleep.

“[WISP users] they have a small nanocomputer next to the bed that helps detect brain waves. And we use machine learning there so that we can recognize brain waves and say what stage of sleep they are in, “said BEL founder Don Tucker, a retired professor at the University of Oregon.

And here it gets weird.

VISP then delivers a light electrical stimulus to various points on the head.

“It simply came to our notice then [the slow waves starting]the device will attach to them and stimulate the brain to make them bigger and last longer, “said Lim.

It only takes a few minutes of VISP stimulation and synchronization.

“It’s interesting that when we do that, the slow oscillations of the brain continue throughout the night. “It’s like starting natural rhythms and maintaining them,” Tucker said.

Finding the right paradigm

The BEL team did not discover this unusual neurobiology, but they managed to isolate and target where these slow waves come from.

So far, they have tested VISP on several people in Oregon and the results are promising.

So much so that it attracted the attention of the US military, which recently linked sleep deprivation in soldiers with accidents, traumatic brain injuries, PTSD and suicide.

The military is now funding a second round of clinical trials, contributing $ 4.3 million divided between VISP and other project-related research.

In preparation, BEL engineers are busy developing a new prototype that will be a little more elegant, modern and comfortable.

It could change lives if VISP delivers and provides people who have no sleep with a better night’s rest, but the job is still at an early stage.

“The concept is to make what already exists easier,” said Lisa Marshall, a neuroscientist at the University of Lübeck in Germany, who researched the phenomenon early but is not linked to the BEL project. “If [the stimulus is] sufficiently individualized in topography and time and all that, it could have very good potential. ”

The extent of that potential will be discovered during a human trial, which is expected to enroll a total of 90 people at the University of Washington and the University of North Carolina this summer. And even then, additional training will probably be needed.

“[You] he may have to find the right kind of paradigm. Maybe use it for three days and then stop and then start again. “Maybe there is some kind of optimum,” Marshall said. “Usually there is an adjustment of the body to any external influence. And some parameters will probably have to change. “

This unprecedented state

If effective, it will likely be years before VISP is widely available, although BEL hopes to market this device as a sleep aid. But this story of innovation in the Northwest Pacific speaks much more than making you feel more rested and awake in the morning.

“We think improving deep sleep is important for anyone over the age of 30 and not getting younger,” Tucker said.

This is because of the connection between deep sleep and the way people create, organize and store different types of memories.

“As you get older, as I can confirm, your memory is not so good for all the random things that happen during the day. And there is very good evidence that it is part of that because you are losing the ability to sleep deeply, “he said. “We think that sleep is one of the ways to improve the brain function of the elderly population.

Tucker isn’t just talking about memories like where we left the keys or that secret ingredient of Grandma’s pie.

Recent discoveries in neuroscience have linked sleep deprivation to much more serious memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia.

The discoveries cover a part of the brain that we did not know existed until about ten years ago. It is called the glymphatic system, which can be considered a type of circulatory system in the brain. Instead of blood, the lymphatic system circulates cerebrospinal fluid (CSF).

Jeffrey Ilif is a collaborator on a larger project that includes VISP testing. He studied neurodegeneration at VA Puget Sound and the University of Washington and was part of the team that first identified the Glymphatic Pathways in 2012.

“The glymphatic system has been described as the way the brain washes away waste products that accumulate during the night,” he said.

These proteins and other metabolic wastes are a byproduct of normal brain function. This garbage collection work performed by the glymphatic system is a phenomenon that Ilif calls “brainwashing”. This happens most effectively during deep, slow-wave sleep.

When this brainwashing stopped - probably due to lack of deep sleep - Ilif said that waste is not cleaned as efficiently. And it is believed that the accumulation of some of these by-products plays a major role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

Measure for measure

This science is so new that much of what we know about the glymphatic system comes from what researchers have observed in mice.

“The Glymph system is an enigma at the moment. We know it exists in mice. We think it exists in humans and we have some evidence. but we really don’t know what it looks like. We don’t know how it works, “said Swati Rane Levendowski, director of the Center for Diagnostic Image at the University of Washington.

It is still impossible to draw clear lines that connect sleep, glimpses and dementia.

“We still don’t have a smoker who says, ‘Yes, damage to this process contributes to Alzheimer’s disease in the human population.’ “The reason why we don’t have that rifle is that we didn’t have a good way to measure this function in the human population in a reasonable way,” Ilif said.

In science, if you can’t measure something, you can’t even understand it.

This is where Rane Levendowski’s work on magnetic resonance imaging in connection with VISP examinations is in sight.

“MRI is my window into their brains,” she explained.

At the University of Washington Medical Center, Rane Levendowski is developing non-invasive ways to measure the flow of the glyph system in humans after good and bad sleep.

“We know that the glymphatic system has many different components. CSF lavage occurs along (outside) the brain. It occurs along the blood vessels in the brain. And then there is the component in which the fluid moves inside the brain tissue and then is released. So, we are trying to see if we can target each of these components using different magnetic resonance imaging methods, “she said.

VISP tests are the perfect opportunity for this because the slow, synchronized waves of deep sleep are when the glymphatic system dumps the most garbage.

“We are trying … to look at the system from many different angles, hoping to capture some part of it. And then put the pieces of the puzzle together and have a picture of the glyphics and how it works, “she said.

If the team’s hypothesis holds, sleep disturbance will disrupt the glymphatic system, and improving deep sleep will make it even better. Ideally, Rane Levendowski’s new MRI techniques will be able to measure the flow of glyphs in both cases.

Techniques could open proverbial drops about glymphatic science.

“They have implications beyond this study … on Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, headaches and concussions and all sorts of other conditions,” Ilif said.

Rane Levendovski said that she sees potential for clinical application as well. It predicts a time when people over the age of 65 will receive routine magnetic resonance imaging to assess how well their glymphatic system is functioning.

“It could be an indication that you are in danger of Alzheimer’s disease,” she said. “So you can help in the beginning, maybe slow down the progression of the disease. And maybe at some point develop a technology or therapy that can only prevent it … at a later stage. “

And if better deep sleep can help prevent disease, that technology could eventually look something like Don Tucker’s VISP headband, improving our sleep tonight and in the future.

“One of the questions is: Can we continue this for weeks and months and really change someone’s brain aging process?” Can we make younger brains by helping to synchronize them in deep sleep? ”He asked.

And maybe we’ll age better if we sleep better.