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Sleeping on a rocking surface improves people’s sleep quality and memory consolidation by synchronizing certain oscillations in the brain, according to a study published today (January 24) in Current Biology. The findings add to existing evidence that rocking is beneficial for human sleep, and provide insights into the neural mechanisms underlying the phenomenon.
“Our volunteers—even if they were all good sleepers—fell asleep more rapidly when rocked and had longer periods of deeper sleep associated with fewer arousals during the night,” study coauthor Laurence Bayer of the University of Geneva says in a statement. “We thus show that rocking is good for sleep.”
The team recruited 18 healthy young adults to sleep three nights in the lab: one night to get accustomed to sleeping there, and then two nights in which data were collected, one on a bed that was gently rocked and the other on a ...
