Good sleep hunting

IT WAS BAD enough for insomniacs a few weeks back when the media were full of reports of sleep walkers raiding the refrigerator after taking Ambien, a popular sleeping pill. The last thing that the sleep-deprived need is something more to stay awake nights worrying about. The fear of consuming several hundred calories without even tasting them could generate its own round of tossing and turning.

Now baseball has resumed, with its months-long jolt to the neurons. Already the Red Sox season has been marked by a flurry of games decided in the late innings, often by one run, a guarantee of video replays in the cerebral cortex until 2 in the morning.

The season was just beginning when the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, issued a study saying that 30 million Americans suffer from chronic insomnia. The study said this costs the nation billions of dollars in medical expenses, accidents, and lost productivity. New York Times health writer Jane E. Brody this month mentioned a list of drug-free treatments, including progressive relaxation, in which the patient focuses on tense muscles and relaxes them one by one, and sleep restriction therapy, in which the trick is to keep patients awake so long that sleep is inevitable.

Another option is brain music therapy, a technique developed at the Moscow Medical Academy. In this treatment, a patient's brain waves, which are as distinctive as fingerprints, are recorded by an EEG, and then the brain-wave frequencies are converted through a step-by-step mathematical procedure into musical frequencies. A patient gets a CD with music unique to that person. Dr. Galina Mindlin of Columbia University in New York said she has used brain music therapy with about 500 patients -- many of whom have had no success with other treatments -- for insomnia, performance anxiety, and other problems. She reports success in 80 to 85 percent of cases.

Mindlin said she listened to a few minutes of her own music, vaguely New Age-y, repeated piano notes, to tune up for an appearance in 2005 on ABC with Diane Sawyer. In the double-blind trials that have been done on the therapy, subjects listen either to their own brain-wave music or a CD designed for someone else. Those listening to their own notes generally report better results than those listening to someone else's.

Mindlin said one patient of hers, a music critic, didn't like his music but said that the therapy worked anyway. Insomniacs are not looking to discover their inner Chopins; they just want to get seven hours of sleep without a drug that can turn them into binge-eaters. Perhaps baseball fans could specify that their notes be played on a stadium organ.