B4
THE ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, JUNE 7, 2022
Northwest researchers explore secrets of sleep
ence there is. And some parameters
will probably have to be changed.”
By JES BURNS
Oregon Public Broadcasting
Early prototypes of any technol-
ogy can be a little persnickety. Just ask
Sofi a Fluke, a test engineer at the Brain
Electrophysiology Lab in Eugene.
She sits hunched over her desk with
a small, orange fl athead screwdriver,
trying to replace the lid on an electron-
ics casing about the size of a deck of
cards.
The screw wobbles as she turns it.
“It easily falls out if you’re not very,
very slow,” she says. “It’s a very deli-
cate process because we just made all
of this ourselves.”
The electronics casing houses the
brains of a new device called the WISP
— or the Wireless Interface Sensor
Pod.
Its DIY origins are rather obvious.
The casing attaches to what looks like a
headlamp strap. Wired electrodes dan-
gle off the sides and others are housed
in a zip-up pouch on the front.
Despite the inelegance of this early
design, the technology itself is any-
thing but.
The WISP has the potential to
change the way people think about
sleep.
The yawning hole
of sleepless nights
The WISP is a headband designed
to be worn while sleeping. It harnesses
brain waves to give you a better night’s
rest.
One in fi ve people in the United
States suff ers from chronic sleep prob-
lems, according to the Centers for Dis-
ease Control and Prevention. And for a
lot of them — including new parents,
night shift workers, soldiers, and nearly
everyone as they get older — the WISP
may eventually provide relief from
sleep deprivation and disrupted sleep.
“We used to think that the need to
sleep was something we could mini-
mize or conquer. But really over the
past couple of decades, we’ve started
to understand just how important it is,”
said Oregon Health and Science Uni-
versity neurologist Miranda Lim.
And it’s not just how long people
sleep. Quality matters.
“Pharmaceutical companies for
decades have been seeking this ‘magic
pill’ or ‘Holy Grail.’ They have medi-
cations out there that do increase total
sleep duration, but many of them have
side eff ects,” she said. “Those don’t
address the quality of sleep.”
The goal of Lim and the team at the
Brain Electrophysiology Lab is to use
WISP to infl uence a sleep stage known
as “deep sleep” or slow-wave sleep.
This early
prototype of
the Wireless
Interface Sensor
Pod showed great
promise in initial
human tests. The
device is designed
to improve the
quality of sleep,
specifi cally deep
sleep.
Brandon Swanson/
Oregon Public
Broadcasting
“Sleep scientists, for many years
now, have thought that the most restor-
ative phase of sleep is slow-wave sleep,
the sleep that you see usually in the fi rst
half of the night as soon as your head
hits the pillow,” Lim said.
Brain waves are normally cha-
otic. Neurons fi re in diff erent parts of
your brain as you talk, move, dream
and solve problems. It’s a purposeful
cacophony. But during deep sleep, your
brain waves slow down and synchro-
nize, throbbing in slow oscillations.
The WISP detects when your brain
is just starting to enter deep sleep.
“(WISP users) have a little nano-
computer at their bedside that helps
to detect the brain waves. And there
we use machine learning so that we
can recognize the brain waves and tell
which stage the sleep they’re in,” said
Brain Electrophysiology Lab founder
Don Tucker, a retired University of
Oregon professor.
And this is where it gets weird.
The WISP then delivers a light elec-
trical stimulus to diff erent spots on the
head.
“At that exact moment it sees (the
slow waves starting), the device will
hook onto those and stimulate the brain
to make those larger and last longer,”
Lim said.
It only takes a few minutes of WISP
stimulation and synchronization.
“The interesting thing was that once
we do that, the brain’s slow oscillations
continue throughout the night. It’s like
we jumpstart the natural rhythms and
keep them going,” Tucker said.
Finding the right paradigm
The team didn’t discover this quirk
of neurobiology, but they have been
able to isolate and target where these
slow waves originate.
They’ve tested WISP on a few peo-
ple in Oregon so far, and the results
are promising.
So much so, that it caught the
attention of the U.S. military, which
recently linked sleep deprivation in
soldiers to accidents, traumatic brain
injury, post-traumatic stress disorder
and suicide.
The military is now funding a sec-
ond round of clinical trials, contrib-
uting $4.3 million split between the
WISP and other research connected to
the project.
In preparation, Brain Electrophys-
iology Lab engineers are busy devel-
oping a new prototype that’ll be a little
more sleek, stylish and comfortable.
It could be life-changing if the
WISP delivers and gives sleep-de-
prived people a better night’s rest, but
the work is still in the early stages.
“The concept is that you facilitate
what is already there,” said Lisa Mar-
shall, a neuroscientist at the Univer-
sity of Lübeck in Germany, who did
early research on this phenomenon,
but is not associated with the proj-
ect. “If (the stimulus is) individual-
ized enough in topography and timing
and all that, it could have a very good
potential.”
The extent of that potential will
be revealed during the human trials,
which are slated to enroll a total of 90
people this summer at the University
of Washington and the University of
North Carolina. And even then, more
refi nement will likely be required.
“(You) might have to fi nd the right
kind of paradigm. Maybe you use it
for three days and then you stop and
then you start again. There might be
some kind of optimum,” Marshall
said. “There is usually adaptation of
the body to whatever external infl u-
This unremembered state
If eff ective, it’ll likely be years before
the WISP is broadly available, though
Brain Electrophysiology Lab does hope
to market the device as a sleep aid. But
this story of Pacifi c Northwest innova-
tion is about much more than feeling
more rested and alert in the morning.
“We think improving deep sleep is
important for everybody who’s over 30
and not getting any younger,” Tucker
said.
That’s because of the connection
between deep sleep and how humans
create, organize and store diff erent types
of memories.
“As you get older, as I can verify,
your memory is not as good for all the
incidental things that happen during the
day. And there’s very good evidence that
part of that’s because you’re losing the
capacity for deep sleep,” he said. “We
think that sleep is one of the ways to
improve the brain function of an aging
population.”
Tucker is not just talking about mem-
ories like where we left our keys or that
secret ingredient in grandma’s pot pie.
Recent discoveries in neuroscience
are linking the lack of sleep with much
more serious memory disorders like Alz-
heimer’s and other types of dementia.
The discoveries involve a part of the
brain people didn’t really know existed
until about a decade ago. It’s called the
glymphatic system, which can be thought
of as a type of circulatory system in the
brain. Instead of blood, the glymphatic
system circulates cerebrospinal fl uid .
Jeff rey Iliff is a collaborator on the
larger project that includes WISP test-
ing. He studies neurodegeneration at
the VA Puget Sound and the University
of Washington and was part of the team
that fi rst identifi ed the glymphatic path-
ways in 2012.
“The glymphatic system was
described as the brain’s way of washing
away wastes during the night that accu-
mulate through the course of the day,” he
said.
These proteins and other metabolic
wastes are a byproduct of normal brain
function. This taking-out-the-trash work
done by the glymphatic system is a phe-
nomenon Iliff calls “brainwashing.” It
happens most effi ciently during deep,
slow-wave sleep.
When this brainwashing is stymied
— possibly through lack of deep sleep
— Iliff said the waste isn’t cleared as
eff ectively. And it’s believed that build-
ups of some of these by-products play a
starring role in the development of Alz-
heimer’s disease.
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