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Rocking like a baby promotes better sleep in adults
We know babies benefit from being rocked to sleep - now a study suggests it helps adults sleep better too.
Researchers from the University of Geneva built a special bed that rocked gently throughout the night. They tested it on 18 young adults and found they woke up fewer times and slept more deeply than on a normal bed. Scientists said the rocking motion resulted in a longer period of slow brainwaves which caused deep sleep, and improved their memory.
The volunteers spent three nights at a sleep laboratory in Geneva: one to get them used to sleeping there, one on a rocking bed and the other on the same bed, but in a still position. Electrodes recorded their brainwaves, and found that the period of deep sleep was extended by rocking.
Also at Science News.
Whole-Night Continuous Rocking Entrains Spontaneous Neural Oscillations with Benefits for Sleep and Memory (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2018.12.028) (DX)
Rocking Promotes Sleep in Mice through Rhythmic Stimulation of the Vestibular System (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2018.12.007) (DX)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by sonamchauhan on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:04AM (3 children)
OK. A Google search then, with plenty of alternate links: :-)
https://www.google.com/search?q=inclined+bed+therapy [google.com]
My point is rocking an inclined body is pretty much how parents rock infants to sleep.
Indeed, it may be how the fetus sleeps in the womb.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday January 27 2019, @10:55AM (1 child)
Or how the primates used to sleep on branches.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday January 27 2019, @02:55PM
Just what I was thinking.
"Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans."
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday January 27 2019, @05:07PM
I'm not sure what the smiley at the end of your comment is supposed to mean. No offense, but if it's supposed to mean, "Tee hee, yes, there's a boatload of other info out there about this, if you'd even taken 2 second to do a search," that does not impress me at all. I can link hundreds (perhaps thousands) of sites that endorse the existence of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster too. All a bunch of random links without questioning their accuracy does is prove there's a lot of random stuff on the internet.
If, on the other hand, your smiley was to indicate, "Tee hee -- there's a load of other crap out there. Have fun sorting through it!" Then I agree. I don't have time to investigate this thoroughly, but I glanced over the first 30 or 40 links in that Google search, and what I see is about half of them or more are trying to sell products. Many others are random blogs or forum posts with people asking for info or promoting it without any serious research. A few links that looked a little more promising I actually clicked on and frequently found discussions of "This is how the Egyptians and King Tut slept" or other such nonsense. That doesn't bode well for scientific accuracy.
Here's the thing: your idea doesn't sound that outlandish. Perhaps it's even true. But when I tried a few brief searches for actual scientific research on this stuff, it seems there's basically nothing out there.
For example, if you like Google and actually want research, try Google scholar [google.com] instead.
There are a few things that are suspicious there. First, there seem to be quite a few patents around this stuff, compared to no scientific research articles using that term. That's a common pattern you see with people who try to sell "alternative therapies" with no empirical support for their claims. About the only scientific research article that shows up in the first few pages of hits is this one [jamanetwork.com] for a "head up" inclined bed... except that article is from 1940.
Honestly, I don't have more time to investigate this. If you want to seriously look into this issue, you may want to try to find ANY legitimate science research on point. If it exists, it must go by a different name in research articles than "inclined bed therapy."
Searching for medical advice on the internet is just an utter crapshoot, honestly. I'm the first to note that the medical establishment often makes mistakes and has endorsed weird ideas in the past, but that's not a reason to abandon all empirical science and just depend on what some people who want to sell you something online would like you to believe. Quacks promoting expensive "cures" have been around forever.
Again, maybe there's something to this. I'm not saying there isn't. I'm saying the vast majority of information I could find in 15 minutes of cursory searching appears to be promoting products and/or is from questionable sources. (And don't be taken in by deceptively named sites either -- one of the top hits for this is the so-called "Sophia Health Institute," an organization that in a couple minutes I could find out appears to promote itself as an "alternative medicine" organization led by one physician who sells really expensive "cures" for conditions that may or may not exist.) I did skim a couple blog posts from more disinterested parties who tried a few weeks sleeping on such a bed and had mixed results, but anecdote isn't enough data to conclude much.
As I said, it sounds at least plausible. But until I see some actual empirical study testing this stuff -- rather than claims about how King Tut used to sleep -- I'll withhold judgment.