Our brains aren’t limited to producing just one type of brain wave at a time, but usually, one type is dominant, and the type it is can often be linked to your level of alertness: delta waves may dominate when you sleep, while gamma waves might dominate when you concentrate intensely.
The idea: Researchers have previously observed that people with Alzheimer’s — a devastating neurological disease affecting more than 6 million people in the US alone — may have weaker and less in-sync gamma waves than people who don’t have the disease.
In a series of past studies, MIT researchers demonstrated a deceptively simple way to increase the power and synchronization of these waves in mouse models of Alzheimer’s: expose the animals to lights flickering and/or sounds clicking at a frequency of 40 Hz.
