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How Smell and Sound Help Your Brain While You Sleep
The science behind ‘pink noise’ and scent
The neighbors are noisy, your baby is teething, and you have a difficult meeting scheduled with your boss tomorrow. Falling and staying asleep is not easy. So it’s no surprise when you don’t feel your best in the morning.
Decades of scientific research performed in controlled laboratory settings have highlighted the damage caused by poor sleep. A lack of quality sleep can harm “neurocognitive performance as well as psychological and physical fitness, readiness, and health,” says Rachel Markwald and Anne Germain, editors of the journal Sleep Medicine Clinics.
We also know sleep affects people’s ability to remember. Short-term sleep deprivation leads to deficits in memory performance and over time results in far-reaching disruption to mental processing, explain neuroscientists Carlos Puentes-Mestril and Sara Aton at the University of Michigan.
And yet, there must be a way of improving sleep and its impact on memory.
