EP #1358: How Pink Noise Produces Sounder Sleep, a Better Memory, and Improves Your Health (Great Way for Easy Self-Care!)

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Hi, I'm Lisa Davis. So glad you are listening to Health Power. You can see some clips from the shows if you'd like, if you go to my Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram at lisa.davis.mph. All right, today we're talking about an article from Naturally Savvy, how pink noise boosts memory and improves sleep. Now, I didn't even know there was such thing as pink noise until I came across this article. I have a white noise machine and that helps me tremendously, but let's jump in and find out what this pink noise is all about. So, changes in sleep patterns occur as we get older.
with the most common ones being more trouble staying asleep and a harder time falling asleep. And according to the National Sleep Foundation, these are a normal part of the aging process. But now researchers say they may have a solution to these problems and it may even boost your memory as well, which is pink noise. So I mentioned the white noise machines, which according to noise sound engineer, Stephane Pigeon, is not what most of us typically think of when we hear the term comforting sounds.
that help us block out the surrounding environment. Now, Pajone explains white noise as the following. A true white noise deals in the second fundamental component of the sound wave, the frequency. Frequency is how fast the waveform is vibrating per second. That's pretty technical. It's easier to understand if you associate it with a single note. Take the middle C note on a keyboard. That note has a frequency of about 261.1 hertz.
To make white noise, a sound engineer combines an equal amount of energy of every frequency a human can hear. Imagine it like hundreds of musicians playing every single note you can hear at once at the same volume. That's white noise. Wow, I didn't realize it was really interesting. Okay, so what's pink noise? So pink noise is a soothing, gentle sound composed of octaves possessing equal energy. It is essentially the background noise we are used to hearing every day and don't even notice.
Researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois discovered that if they synced pink noise to the brainwaves of older men and women while they slept, the subjects experienced better quality of deep sleep as well as an improvement in memory. That's so interesting. Now it's been shown in numerous studies over the years, sleep is critical for converting short-term memories into long-term memories. The type of sleep that is necessary for this conversation is deep sleep, AKA,
Lisa Davis (02:23.29)
slow wave sleep or non dream state sleep, which is part of the non rapid eye movement sleep cycle. And as we get older, the quality of deep sleep declines, which in turn can have a significant impact on memory as well as sleep quality. Deep sleep is also important because it's a stage when the body cells increase production and there's a reduction, the breakdown of proteins. Thus, this is a time of tissue repair, giving meaning to the term beauty sleep.
Other benefits of deep sleep are a slowing of activity in the areas of the brain involved with emotion, social engagement, and decision-making, which suggests deep sleep helps people maintain an emotional balance. So let's talk about how scientists use pink noise. So in previous studies in young adults, they found a link between acoustic sound stimulation of deep sleep brain activity and an improvement of memory. Now these findings prompted Dr. Phyllis Zee
a professor of neurology at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern and her colleagues to try acoustic simulation in a group of older adults and see how it affected sleep and memory. So if you want all of the details of the study, you can see the show notes. I'll just tell you briefly that the study group consisted of 13 men and women ages 60 to 84, who each were subjected to one night of acoustic stimulation involving pin