The Pentagon Is Trying to Modulate Your REM Sleep
A Department of Defense-led research project wants to modulate REM sleep to help ease stress.
The study also aims to enhance REM sleep in order to consolidate traumatic memories.
Controlling REM sleep could offer multiple health benefits, but also opens the door to additional theories.
The Department of Defense wants to see if anyone out there can control rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. The department has put out a call for submissions to do just that, all with the goal of easing stress and traumatic memories. But there could be more to the equation.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Defense Sciences Office issued what it calls a Disruption Opportunity, “inviting submissions of innovative basic or applied research concepts in the technical domain of neuromodulation as a means of enhancing rapid eye movement (REM) sleep mechanisms associated with stress adaption and traumatic memory consolidation.”
The feasibility study and proof of concept would be worth $1 million for the team with the winning submission.
The goal is to learn how to modulate—or control—REM sleep to help ease stress and post-traumatic stress. But there’s speculation that we can expect a bit more from this Opportunity than understanding REM sleep. In a Sociable post, the outlet posits that “the idea of modulating and even artificially implanting dreams is not far off.”
As Sociable notes, the Department of Defense Disruption Opportunity doesn’t mention anything about dream incubation. But the continued investigation of everything from targeted dream incubation to targeted memory reactivation isn’t necessarily that far off from the “memory consolidation” the DARPA brief calls for.
However, at the moment, this is all speculation. And while it may be exciting to think about a real-life incarnation of the movie Inception, the stated goal of the DARPA effort—using REM sleep to help understand how to control sleep in order to reduce sleep disturbances and prevent PTSD—is nothing to sneeze at in and of itself.
A 2015 study in the Biology of Mood & Anxiety Disorders highlights how post-traumatic stress disorders often come accompanied by disturbed sleep, including fragmented rapid eye movement. The study notes that sleep disturbance resulting from acute trauma may contribute to PTSD, and that continued sleep disturbances can exacerbate PTSD.
“We suggest that optimizing sleep quality following trauma, and even strategically timing sleep to strengthen extinction memories therapeutically instantiated during exposure therapy,” the authors write, “may allow sleep itself to be recruited in the treatment of PTSD and other trauma and stress-related disorders.”
Using targeted sleep improvements to better the health of patients, including veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, could offer up a new tool to helping improve the post-military life of United States military personnel.
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