Study Objective: Sleep is critical for physical and mental health. However, sleep disruption due to noise is a growing problem, causing long-lasting distress and fragilizing entire populations mentally and physically. Here for the first time, we tested an innovative and non-invasive potential countermeasure for sleep disruptions due to noise. Methods: We developed a new, modeling-based, closed-loop acoustic neurostimulation procedure (CLNS) to precisely phase-lock stimuli to slow oscillations (SO). We used CLNS to align, soft sound pulses to the start of the SO positive deflection to boost SO and sleep spindles during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. Participants underwent three overnight EEG recordings. The first night served to determine each participant ′s individual noise arousal threshold. The remaining two nights occurred in counterbalanced order: in the Disturbing night, loud, real-life noises were repeatedly presented; in the Intervention night, similar loud noises were played while using the CLNS to boost SO. All experimental manipulations were performed in the first three hours of sleep; participants slept undisturbed for the rest of the night. Results: In contrast to the Disturbing night, the probability of arousals caused by noise was significantly decreased in the Intervention night. Moreover, the CLNS intervention increased NREM duration and sleep spindle power across the night. Conclusions: These results show that our CLNS procedure can effectively protect sleep from disruptions caused by noise. Remarkably, even in the presence of loud environmental noise, CLNS ′ soft and precisely timed sound pulses played a beneficial role in protecting sleep continuity. This represents the first successful attempt at using CLNS in a noisy environment.
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