The Science of Sleep: From Pulses to Exploding Head Syndrome

This OZY original series goes way beyond counting sheep to explore the past and future of getting some shut-eye.

It might be the most important determinant of whether you have a good day or not. Sleep affects your mood, your productivity, your decision-making … and yet we still know very little about it. With this series, OZY reporters go backward, forward and sideways on unexplored aspects of sleep, from weird technological innovations of the past to the future of making yourself go to sleep when your brain just will not be quiet.

Imagine fading into a deep sleep as the sound of a slow, mechanical whirl gives way to a scratchy recording of a calm, yet droning voice. “Money wants me and comes to me; business wants me and comes to me; opportunities want me and come to me. I have abundance, and use it wisely.”

Creepy? Perhaps. But long before excessively stressed and sleep-deprived millennials began relying on various apps to doze off peacefully or improve their day-to-day lives, there was only Alois Benjamin Saliger’s “Psycho-Phone.” Developed in the late 1920s, this phonographic device played encouraging messages while listeners slept to supposedly help them become, as the saying goes, “a better you.”

A growing number of companies want to solve sleep problems once and for all with electrostimulation devices.

Insomniacs have tried meditation apps, hypnosis and sleeping pills, but a new method of sleep therapy is on the rise. You probably haven’t tried it, and you may have not even heard of it. For decades, medical practitioners have prescribed electrostimulation devices, referred to as “electroceuticals” in the industry (as opposed to pharmaceuticals) for pain management. Now, an increasing number of companies are developing devices using that technology to cure insomnia, offering an approach that allows users to avoid or minimize sleeping pills.