I wonder: 50ms of pink noise at the right time to make your sleep more restorative. Why or how should such a “backdoor” have evolved? Sleeping by a crackling fire? Pure coincidence, like a bug in the system that never made enough of a difference to come under selection pressure?
Previous work had already shown that delivering an auditory stimulus at the peak of slow waves can deepen the waves.
“You can make more of these electrical slow waves through an auditory stimulus, if it comes at just the right time. Similar to a child on a swing, if you push them when they’re at the right moment in their movement, you can make that swing go farther,” Lewis says. “The challenge is: How do you find just the right time?”
The auditory stimulus used for this study is a 50-millisecond burst of pink noise. Similar to white noise, pink noise contains all sound frequencies audible to the human ear, but the lower pitch frequencies are louder and the higher pitch frequencies are softer. This creates a balanced, gentle sound similar to steady rain or a distant waterfall.