SOME people swear by a wee dram. Others prefer to count sheep. But Boris
Pasche, Swiss doctor-turned-inventor, puts his faith in a very different kind of
remedy for sleeplessness鈥攁 spoon-shaped radio transmitter that you suck
like a lollipop.
Is he serious? Yes. Very. 鈥淔or the first time in the history of insomnia we
have something that restores natural sleep. No sleeping pill will do this,鈥�
declares Pasche from the New York office of Symtonic, the company he set up to
develop the device.
Nobody else is quite that bullish about what Pasche and his colleagues have
christened Low Energy Emission Therapy. Yet sleep experts seem cautiously
impressed. 鈥淚 was sceptical at first,鈥� admits Thomas Roth of the Henry Ford
Hospital in Detroit, Michigan. 鈥淏ut the indications are that it does have some
biological effects and is effective in treating insomnia in some
肠颈谤肠耻尘蝉迟补苍肠别蝉.鈥�
Advertisement
But why on earth should radio waves beamed through the mouth and into the
head make someone sleep more soundly? The short answer is, nobody knows. Pasche
and his colleagues believe that the electromagnetic field produced by the spoon
device somehow influences the brain鈥檚 biochemistry and electrical rhythms,
making relaxation and sleep come more easily. But the radio signal it beams out
is between a hundred and a thousand times weaker than those emitted by mobile
phones. How brain cells could detect such a weak radio field mystifies
physicists.
Boosting dreams
And yet detect it they must if the device鈥檚 performance in the sleep lab is
anything to go by. For the largest trial, the researchers recruited 106
insomniacs at two different clinics, Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California and
the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. Those patients who
received the therapy proper鈥攁s opposed to the sham treatment that was
given to controls鈥攆ell asleep about 18 minutes faster than usual. They
also slept more soundly, spending less time awake in the night and sleeping for
about an hour and a quarter longer overall.
But it鈥檚 what the device doesn鈥檛 do鈥攃ause harmful side
effects鈥攖hat most animates Pasche. Sleeping pills such as the
benzodiazepines help people to fall asleep faster and get more light sleep, but
only at a price. The pills also suppress deep sleep and the bursts of frenetic
brain activity, or Rapid Eye Movement sleep, that normally end each 90-minute
sleep cycle. The result is fewer dreams and side effects ranging from memory
loss to daytime grogginess.
None of this happens with the spoon device. In fact, if anything, says
Pasche, the radio waves it emits stimulate REM sleep and dreaming, to the tune
of 30 per cent. Nor does the device have to be in the mouth all night to work.
According to the researchers, insomniacs need only use the spoon for about
20 minutes. And so long-lasting, apparently, are its effects that patients
can take their therapy every other afternoon and still expect to sleep better
at nights.
More puzzling still is that the device works properly only if the radio waves
it beams out are tuned to special 鈥渋nsomnia relieving鈥� frequencies (see
Diagram). Why would the brains of insomniacs be receptive to some AM radio-wave
frequencies and not others? 鈥淔rankly,鈥� says Ted Litovitz, an expert on the
biological effects of electromagnetic fields at the Catholic University of
America in Washington DC, 鈥渢hat kind of specificity very much surprises me.鈥� The
researchers themselves have no grand theory but say that animal experiments lend
empirical support to the idea
In the 1970s, Ross Adey鈥檚 team at Lome Linde in California found that
exposing cats to VHF waves below about 50 hertz made some of their brain rhythms
less erratic and longer-lasting. Others have since reported that 15 hertz radio
waves will boost slow, rhythmic brain waves in rabbits at the expense of faster,
more erratic activity.FIG-mg20799201.GIF
So perhaps the spoon device does something similar in humans. Relaxing or
nodding off usually involves the brain鈥檚 electrical activity becoming more
synchronised, slower and more rhythmic. Pasche says his team can detect such
brain wave changes in insomniacs receiving radio wave therapy.
But again, how? Radio waves could influence the brain by heating it like a
micro-wave oven. But that would require radio-wave fields far more intense than
those produced by the device. Nor could 鈥渂rain warming鈥� explain why some
frequencies work better than others, since their thermal effects would be
roughly the same. Instead, Pasche believes the answer lies with a far more
specific interaction between radio waves and brain chemistry. Sleeping pills
work by damping down nerve cell activity. Perhaps, says Pasche, radio waves
influence brain rhythms that way too.
Many labs, he points out, claim that low-energy electromagnetic fields can do
things like stimulate the brain鈥檚 pineal gland to secrete melatonin, a hormone
that regulates sleep, or disrupt the flow of calcium or other ions across nerve
membranes鈥攃hanges that could damp down nerve cells.
Such findings are controversial because the field energies involved are so
vanishingly small inside the body. Yet even arch-sceptics admit, when pushed,
that radio-wave effects are merely improbable rather than impossible. After all,
radio waves can at least penetrate tissue easily, unlike the electromagnetic
fields of power lines and electrical appliances. 鈥淲e know of no mechanism by
which very low intensity radio waves can affect brain rhythms,鈥� says Robert
Adair of Yale University. 鈥淏ut I鈥檓 by no means certain that they couldn鈥檛.鈥�
And anyone who recoils at the idea of sucking a radiotransmitter in the name
of sleep should consider this: the prototype was designed to fit up the nose.
The researchers switched orifices only when it became clear they could get
better radio contact in the wetter environment of the mouth.