Studies Show That Rocking Motion Improve Sleep And Memory

"Sleeping well at night means falling asleep quickly and then falling asleep all night," says Laurence Bayer, of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. "Our volunteers, even if they all slept well, slept more quickly when they rocked and had longer periods of deeper sleep associated with fewer awakenings during the night, so we showed that rocking is good for sleeping."

Bayer and colleagues had previously shown that continuous rolling during a 45-minute nap helped people fall asleep faster and sleep more soundly. In the new study, led by Laurence Bayer and Sophie Schwartz, of the University of Geneva, Switzerland, they wanted to explore the effects of sleep balancing and their associated brain waves throughout the night.

The researchers recruited 18 healthy young adults to undergo sleep monitoring in the laboratory. The first night was meant to accustom them to sleeping there. Then they stayed two more nights: one sleeping on a gently rocking bed and the other sleeping on an identical bed that did not move.

The data showed that participants fell asleep faster while rocking. Once asleep, they also spent more time in the dream of non-rapid eye movements, slept more deeply and woke up less.

Next, the researchers wanted to know how sleep best affects memory. To assess the consolidation of memory, participants studied pairs of words. The researchers then measured their accuracy by remembering those paired words in an afternoon session compared to the next morning when they woke up. They discovered that people did better in the morning test when they rocked while they slept.

Other studies showed that balancing affects brain oscillations during sleep. They saw that the swinging movement caused a drag of brain oscillations specific to the sleep of non-rapid eye movements (slow oscillations and spindles). As a result, the continuous rolling movement helped synchronize neuronal activity in the thalamus-cortical brain networks, which play an important role in both sleep consolidation and memory.

The second mouse study by Konstantinos Kompotis and colleagues is the first to explore whether balancing promotes sleep in other species. And, in fact, he did. The researchers, led by Paul Franken of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, used commercial agitators to move the mice's cages while they slept.

While it was found that the best rocking frequency for mice was four times faster than in people, the researchers' studies show that rocking reduced the time it took to fall asleep and increased sleep time in mice as well as in humans. However, the mice showed no evidence of sleeping more deeply.

By: Preeti Narula

Content: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190124110844.htm