Objectives:
Our main objective behind Cognitive Sleep is to allow you to undergo your own personal cognitive therapy, through self-experimenting and testing the possibilities that sleep, sound and music have to offer. As such, we intend to give you the necessary tools and information available in order to allow you to undergo your personal targeted-memory reactivation process for improving your next-day problem solving abilities.
Targeted Memory-Reactivation Benefits:
- Optimize and organize information
- Strengthen your memory
- And improve your learning and problem-solving skills
Our Inspiration:
Our project is inspired by Sanders, Osburn, Paller and Beeman’s (2019) experimental findings regarding ways of improving next-day problem solving by targeting memory reactivation during sleep by means of sound. In said experiment, 60 participants were presented with numerous puzzles, each of which were arbitrarily linked to a different sound. During the course of the day, participants were asked to solve these puzzles until they had reached a total of 6 unresolved ones, at which point they were asked to stop. While participants slept overnight, 3 of the sounds associated with the puzzles they hadn’t solved yet were played back to them. When they then resumed their puzzle-solving activity the following day, participants solved 31.7% of cued puzzles, compared with 20.5% of uncued puzzles (a 55% improvement), thereby supporting the hypothesis that sound reinforcement during sleep had a positive effect on their next-day problem solving abilities.
Our Proposal:
Our experiment follows these same guidelines, whereby we encourage you to listen to our selected playlists during the day and then have you choose those tracks which you heard during a certain "puzzling" moment, and have them played back at night while you're asleep. This is done in order to reactivate those specific moments of your day which you feel need further working on.
We provide purposefully composed soundscapes and music for you to have a more rewarding experience, and recommend you test this experiment at home or wherever it is that you feel most comfortable at. We have created Spotify playlists specifically intended for moments of work and relax, and plan on increasing the available selection soon.
Our experiment is based on citizen science fundamentals, whereby we encourage public participation and collaboration in our research, and the information gathered is then utilized for further increasing the current scientific knowledge available.
Materials:
For this experiment, you will need:
- A Laptop, Smartphone or Tablet;
- A Sleep Monitoring and Cueing System (SMCS), provided by us;
- And a Spotify Premium Account*, which may also be provided by us.
*If you currently don't have a Spotify Premium Account, there's no need to worry. As part of our incentive towards fellow participants, we are giving out a free 1-month Spotify Premium pass with the opportunity of continuous renewal as long as the self-experiment is kept underway and the findings shared. This is simply done in order to further increase the current scientific knowledge available concerning sound and cognitive therapy.
Procedure:
So, how does our experiment work?
To start off, choose a playlist which feels adequate for the moment you find yourself in:
Playlists:
- Work
- Relax
Upon hearing it, your sole task is to, if confronted with any problem or issue during this time, go to your playback device and click on the "add to playlist" icon, in order to keep a record of both the song and the time it was played.
Now, before you've gone to sleep, it is important to set your phone or laptop on a level surface near your bed, and have it connected to the SMCS. This will read your brain activity during sleep to determine your sleep stage, and it will automatically begin playing your saved playlist once it detects you've entered slow-wave sleep (SWS).
Why is the SWS phase recommended?
Subsequently delivering cues during SWS produces better learning compared with control conditions (Rasch, Büchel, Gais, & Born, 2007). In addition, prior TMR studies demonstrated memory strengthening and reorganization using cues presented during SWS (Hu, Cheng, Chiu, & Paller, 2019).
It is important to set the volume at a low-level, since the idea is not to be woken up, but to simply receive the musical stimuli while asleep. The playlist will commence with our "pink noise" track, in order to reduce the likelihood that the other tracks will provoke arousal. If, by any chance, you are woken up by our tracks, simply press "Stop" in order to pause all incoming sounds, and the SMCS will reactivate the playlist once it detects you've entered SWS again.
Our Predictions:
We hope that through memory reactivation during sleep, you will be able to restructure your conception of a "puzzle" or problem, considering that sleep can be beneficial both for producing enduring memories and for altering stored information (Lewis et al., 2018). We predict that the tracks will be linked by now with your previously confronted issues and, as such, should allow you to go through an efficient memory reactivation process for obtaining improved next-day problem solving abilities.
Bonus:
In addition, our playlists are well-suited for "masking" unwanted outside noises, as well as having the possibility of fostering a harmonious atmosphere within the environment you're in.
FAQs (to be added soon):
- What are the steps to follow before starting the experiment?
- Is the experiment free?
- Where can I download the CS app?
- Do I need to share my personal details?
- How can I contact Cognitive Sleep?
- Do you have a physical store as well?
- What is an SMCS exactly?
- What does Open Source mean?
- Can this experiment have any potential side-effects?
- What if I decide to quit the experiment?