Rocking Improves Sleep, Memory

Date: 26 January 2019 - 21:01

News ID: ۶۲۵۰۳

GENEVA (Dispatches) -- Two new studies, one conducted in young adults and the other in mice, add to evidence for the broad benefits of a rocking motion during sleep. In fact, the studies in people show that rocking not only leads to better sleep, but it also boosts memory consolidation during sleep.
"Having a good night's sleep means falling asleep rapidly and then staying asleep during the whole night," says Laurence Bayer of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. "Our volunteers -- even if they were all good sleepers -- fell asleep more rapidly when rocked and had longer periods of deeper sleep associated with fewer arousals during the night. We thus show that rocking is good for sleep."
The researchers enlisted 18 healthy young adults to undergo sleep monitoring in the lab. The first night was intended to get them used to sleeping there. They then stayed two more nights -- one sleeping on a gently rocking bed and the other sleeping on an identical bed that wasn't moving.
The data showed that participants fell asleep faster while rocking. Once asleep, they also spent more time in non-rapid eye movement sleep, slept more deeply, and woke up less.
Further studies showed that rocking affects brain oscillations during sleep. They saw that the rocking motion caused an entrainment of specific brain oscillations of non-rapid eye movement sleep (slow oscillations and spindles). As a result, the continuous rocking motion helped to synchronize neural activity in the thalamo-cortical networks of the brain, which play an important role in both sleep and memory consolidation.