DrLarsonSleeps

Thanks for your interest! You're not alone in your struggles, unfortunately.

The Sleep Shepherd is a comfortable headband that does two things: it aids someone in falling asleep by playing binaural tones through built-in speakers, and it gives quantitative information about sleep that we currently can't get anywhere else.

Doctors define our sleep stages by the rate of our brain activity. The binaural beats have a brain entrainment quality that helps our brains slow naturally–without taking drugs. I'm passionate about helping people sleep ever since my own daughter developed chronic sleep problems. The original Sleep Shepard was invented for her and it has helped her so much my friends and I decided to make it widely available as possible.

Currency works when the people have faith that it has value. Being "backed" by something is the surest way to bolster that faith, that "something" can be a thing that we all feel has enduring value, such as gold. It turns out that it can also be faith in each other. Back in the day, I may have had leftover nails from building my house, but I was hungry. My soon to be neighbor was well fed, but getting wet in the rain. We realized that a swap of nails for corn was a good deal. It got complicated fast: after I ate the corn I wanted to swap my nails for an iPhone, but the person making those wanted corn. It was a pain to go swap for corn and then take the corn to the Apple Store. So money was born for us to exchange to make that process easier--but we had to trust that there were corn, nails and cell phones to give it value. It was more comforting to know that the government was behind the value, backing it with gold, instead of relying on all the currency carrying citizens to keep working hard growing, forging and running sweat shops in developing nations. Now we are back to that, at a time the complications are greater than ever. Will it come back to haunt us? I'm reminded of sitting in a meeting hearing of dire predictions of the future and the person next to me leaned over and asked, "did he say we'll be in trouble someday or Sunday?" Because, you know, it makes a difference. With the looming specter a global financial disaster, some people are hoping to reduce their stress by mining BitCoins...

Unlike drugs, which alter the biochemistry in our brains often in unnatural ways, the Sleep Shepherd plays binaural tones which are well within the normal hearing range and have been shown to be safe by the millions of people who have listened to them since the 1950s for a variety of purposes, most notably meditation. The innovation of the Sleep Shepherd is controlling the frequency of those safe binaural tones to be a little slower than the current brain activity state as measured by a built-in brain wave sensor, in order to literally usher deeper sleep.

Geek alert: The binaural tones are interpreted by the hard wiring of nerves in a part of the brain stem called the Medial Superior Olive (MSO), which is the first stop for signals coming our brains, as being a tone emanating from a speaker which is swaying back-and-forth in front of us as if on a pendulum. Our brains entrain to the frequency of that back and forth effect. Pilot studies at three universities are all showing that the Sleep Shepherd can help people get deeper sleep.

"Sleep" is defined by the rate of our brain activity. We talk about "brain waves" because our brain cells don't just fire at will, but prefer to transmit signals down their lengths when they are stimulated by opera brain cells. This gives rise to the wave affect.When we are awake and alert doing interesting things, such as reading Reddit threads, there are electro-chemical signals flowing through the neurons of our cortex at a rate of 40 to 60 per second, or 40-60Hz. When we are calm and meditative that rate can be around 20 Hz. When we are falling off to light sleep The brain rate is typically 10 Hz. In deepest sleep the rate is all the way down to about 1Hz. So the name of the game is to encourage someone's brain to literally slow down. When people complain about not sleeping because their brains were "racing",there is a lot of scientific truth to that statement. "Brain entrainment" is the name given to the phenomenon when brain activity adjusts to match the frequency of an external stimulus. The Sleep Shepherd uses the powerful entrainment of Binaural tones because these prompt the brain to create its own periodic stimulus that encourages the rest of the brain to follow. While the effect is a clear aid to achieving sleep, the technique is language agnostic. So I'm sorry to say it won't help you learn Spanish any quicker.

I'm sorry you have to deal with this. Dreams occur during the REM sleep stage. The interesting things about that stage is that your brain is as active as it is when you are awake and most of us experience an in voluntary paralysis of our voluntary muscles, presumably to stop us from acting out the dreams we're having. While REM is in many ways still poorly understood, we believe that the processes in our brains that reinforce daytime memories don't kick in after dreaming and thus we don't remember most of the content. Usually the dreams we do remember occur during the last REM period of the night, particularly if our alarm clock goes off during a dreaming time. Contrary to popular belief, it seems that our dreams happen in real time. Dream researchers generally believe that the dreams are intensified during times of high stress in life. So the first thing to try is to remove the stressors. Since that is impractical in many cases, it is good to take some time before bedtime to relax our minds. Typically it's good to stay away from email, Facebook or exciting entertainment right before bed. Without meaning to alarm you, there are some sleep conditions that include intense, scary dreaming. It maybe something you want to discuss with your doctor and perhaps check a trusted medical website for some general info; many like to turn to webMD or the mayo clinic.