Treatment of insomnia: Do not use drugs, use waves to impact the brain

Do not use sleeping pills to treat insomnia . US scientists have just experimented with a new technique that uses low frequency waves to affect the brain to treat insomnia. They created the so-called " artificial sleep ".

US scientists have just experimented with a new technique to help people who have lost a long time of sleep finding deep sleep. They hope that this technique will lead to a new treatment for insomnia.

Human sleep is divided into several stages, in which the deepest sleep phase occurs when the brain is in a condition called 'low frequency brain wave activity' - that is, the state of the electrical impulses all over the brain, about 1 wave per second and about 1,000 times like that in one night.

To produce such low frequency waves, psychiatrist Professor Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison used a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to introduce magnetic pulses Harmless into the brain. These magnetic pulses will stimulate the induced motor area in the brain to produce low frequency waves.

According to Professor Tononi, before the stimulation of magnetic pulses, volunteers' brains immediately produced low frequency waves characteristic of a deep sleep. In order for those low-frequency waves to spread throughout the brain, the team found a suitable position on the patient's head to place a magnetic coil connected to the TMS machine. Meanwhile, the patient will carry a cap to cover the entire head, which contains 60 electrodes connected to an EEG to monitor all electrical impulses in the brain.

According to the research team, low-frequency brain wave activity plays a very important role in restoring people's health and ability to work in the areas of learning, thinking and memory.

The team hopes this new technique will lead to a new treatment for insomnia.(Photo: Daily Mail)

Professor Tononi hopes that the benefits of sleep generated by machines, even for a few hours, can provide benefits equivalent to the benefits of a natural sleep for 8 hours created for human health. He also said that creating such low frequency waves could lead to a new treatment for future insomnia.

However, today, scientists still cannot determine whether sleep with the help of electronic means will bring the same benefits to human health such as natural sleep.

Therefore, there were some reservations about Professor Tononi's method. According to Dr. Chris Idzikowski, director of the Edinburgh (Scotland) Sleep Research Center, trying to create such a deep sleep for insomnia is a very supportive study.

Professor Tononi's research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA).

Minh Quang