Mandy Oaklander | September 25, 2026

What's your trick for getting restorative sleep? (No, really—if you have one, please tell me. I could use it.)

Scientists are following a curious lead in that arena. A new study, which my colleague Veronique Greenwood recently covered, found that playing precisely timed bursts of a sound called pink noise while people slept changed the flow of fluid within their brains.

More research is needed, but the study authors hope this may one day lead to a non-invasive way to make sleep more refreshing. Read a snippet of their conversation with Veronique below.

TODAY’S TOPICS

Taking the scenic route
When reproductive health erodes
An interview with sleep scientists
Why you should join a choir

HOW WE RELAX

I meandered down a nature trail

A nature trail at Wekiwa Springs State Park
Angela Haupt

Last week, while on vacation in Florida, I took a couple-mile stroll along a nature trail at a cold spring. No one else was around, and all I could hear was birds chirping and insects buzzing. I stopped to admire an impressive variety of fungi, sprawling ferns, and palms that seemed to stretch in every direction.

It was nice to have absolutely nowhere else to be—and to be able to give the mushrooms the attention they deserve. —Angela Haupt, Editor, Health & Wellness

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TODAY I LEARNED

The downstream effects of defunding Planned Parenthood

New research from the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit focused on reproductive rights, estimates that removing Planned Parenthood health centers from the publicly funded contraceptive care system—something that lawmakers and activists who are opposed to abortion have long lobbied for—would reduce access in counties home to 12.4 million women who need such care. —Alana Semuels, Senior Correspondent

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QUICK CHAT

Noise isn’t always the enemy of sleep

Getting good sleep is important for health, and some researchers wonder whether playing certain sounds—like “pink noise,” which is similar to white noise but a bit more pleasant to listen to—might help improve sleep quality.

Two of the authors of a study I covered recently, Laura Lewis of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Josh Levitt of Boston University, looked at what happened to the sleeping brain when they played pink noise during a certain type of brain wave. I asked them how our brains interpret sound when we’re asleep. —Veronique Greenwood, Staff Writer

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Getty Images

Is there evidence linking slow waves and sounds played to sleepers?

Josh Levitt: Yes. There’s a good body of literature now about how sounds and slow waves are linked to each other. So, for example, slow waves early in sleep are sometimes called K complexes. The K in K complex stands for “knock,” because people found that when they knocked on the door of somebody who was doing a sleep study, they got a K complex.

It seems like slow waves may be related, at least in some way, to a sensory gating response. Basically, that’s your brain's way of making sure you don't wake up every time some sound in your environment happens. It may be that that is part of what's happening when we do our sound simulation in this experiment, but we don't know that for sure.

So your body might respond to sound by throwing you deeper into sleep. It’s amazing how sensitive the sleeping brain seems to be to sound.

Laura Lewis: A crucial thing during sleep is some things need to wake you up, but some things you need to sleep through, or you would never sleep. I think that there's also lots of cases of sleep being influenced by rhythmic noise, like shushing a baby, for example.

This study looked at how pink noise affects cerebrospinal fluid in the brain. What are the next steps?

LL: This is a proof-of-concept study where Josh developed the technology to actually have a way to modulate cerebrospinal fluid flow, but everybody in the study was healthy. And they were young to midlife, and so we'd like to now see, could we improve this algorithm for people that may have sleep disorders or people who may be aging? Do we need to tweak the algorithm to work better in patient populations? That's something that we're interested to explore.

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WHAT WE’RE READING

During a 16-hour brain surgery, part of a patient’s skull ended up on the floor. He shares the surreal story in the Guardian.
In our politically divided times, choirs are attracting a new generation of singers, writes Elizabeth Endicott for TIME.
The World Health Organization reports that the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo continues to expand, and roughly 48% of people who get the disease die—a higher fatality rate than previous outbreaks.