![]() Failing to get enough sleep is like throwing a party and then firing the cleanup crew.Ī National Institutes of Health study showed that twenty-five to thirty per cent of American adults have periodic episodes of sleeplessness and twenty per cent suffer from chronic insomnia. Many scientists have come to believe that while we sleep the space between our neurons expands, allowing a cranial sewage network-the glymphatic system-to flush the brain of waste products that might otherwise not only prevent memory formation but muck up our mental machinery and perhaps eventually lead to Alzheimer’s. Not to be a downer, but chronic sleep deprivation, which Amnesty International designates a form of torture, has been linked to diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, learning difficulties, colds, gastrointestinal problems, depression, execution (the sleep-starved defense minister of North Korea is rumored to have been shot after dozing in the presence of Kim Jong-un), world disasters (the Challenger explosion, the Three Mile Island meltdown), and non-disasters (the drop in the polls of Donald Trump, who is reported to get only three or four hours of shut-eye a night). According to scientists I spoke with, the quality of your slumber has more repercussions on your happiness, intelligence, and health than what you eat, where you live, or how much money you make. Unfortunately for me, regularly spending a chunk of the nighttime in a state of suspended consciousness and drool turns out to be a gigantic deal. Besides, I’d always thought, What’s the big deal about being tired as long as your job doesn’t involve flying a plane-or, I suppose I should add, responsibilities like getting dressed? My favorite TV show, I used to say, was “The Late, Late, Late, Late Show.” When I got older, I liked being up at night because it seemed more productive to work when nobody was calling or e-mailing, and by work I mean Netflix. I tried to train myself to sleep with my forearm upright, my head propped on my palm, so that if my parents walked by my room they’d see that I never slept and therefore didn’t need a bedtime. As a child, I was convinced that turning in meant missing out on illicit fun. I have spent my life staying up later than I should. Every so often, I will resort to counting sheep-actually, I count divorced couples I know, and sometimes, at 5 A.M., couples who should get divorced-but, in general, I do not want to fall asleep ever. In my case, it’s hard to say whether it was the hat or causes non-millinery that ushered me into dreamland each of the nights I wore it: I always woke up to find the hat on the floor. The contraption apparently did the trick. ![]() ![]() Larson told me, over the phone, that he came up with it to treat his daughter, who had an autoimmune disease that prevented her from getting enough deep sleep. The hat was invented by Michael Larson, a mechanical engineer at the University of Colorado. It’s supposed to be soothing, and, truth be told, I don’t mind it. The noise sounds like the tone you’d expect to hear before a nuclear disaster. Gradually, the rhythm will slow down and, supposedly, so will my brain, entrained as if by a hypnotist. There are also built-in speakers that emit pulsing tones mimicking the frequencies of my brain waves. The hat measures activity in my cerebral cortex through three sensors sewn into the fabric-one covering each ear and a third handling the forehead. The box has an on-off switch, and I’m going to turn it on so that the mechanism can commune with my head. If I were an alien, this would be the port through which I’d receive my instructions from the mother ship. The hat is a stretchy black beanie, but where you might normally find a pompom there’s a plastic box the size of a Triscuit. It’s 2:49 A.M., more or less my bedtime, and I’m about to put on my Sleep Shepherd hat, a device designed to help the wearer go gentle into unconsciousness ($149.99).
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