I’ve always felt that I sleep better in a cool bedroom than a warm one, but a new gizmo seems to demonstrate something my wife has long known: I’m dead wrong.
A team of Dutch scientists has built what looks to be a wetsuit that’s lined with tiny plastic tubes. Volunteers put on the wet suit and go to bed. The scientists then pump warm water through the tubes and see what happens.
For most subjects, it seems, warmer water yields better slumber, Wired reports.
The suit allowed the Dutch team to fine tune subjects’ skin temperature to 35 or 35.4 degrees Celsius. They found that increasing skin temperature by 0.4 degrees Celsius, “suppresses nocturnal wakefulness … and shifts sleep to deeper stages … in young and, especially, in elderly healthy and insomniac participants.” The suit worked particularly well for the older patients: they were 14 times less likely to be awake at 6 am when the heat was turned up that mere 0.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
Here’s the full (though very technical) story reported in the journal Brain.
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