Slightly weird one here, but I thought I'd post it on MMM because you are an open minded, fix-it-yourself bunch.
To introduce, I have the very annoying problem of chronic primary insomnia. I almost always take an hour or more to get to sleep. I also often wake up in the middle of the night. This wastes my time and makes me less happy and effective during the day. I have no other psychological problems and, as best my doctors and I have been able to tell, no underlying physical problems either. As best I can remember, I have had this my entire life. Although I use them occasionally if it's very important that I'm awake the next day, I've generally avoided sleeping pills, since the evidence of their long term effectiveness is actually quite poor relative to the risk of side effects and addiction. I have an unfortunate natural variation in ability to sleep that is at the poorer end of normal and I just have to live with that.
Or so I thought. Recently I came across
this article reporting research showing that simply fitting a water cooled cap to the heads of people like me at night pretty much eliminated the symptoms of insomnia in 75% of patients! The proposed mechanism is that the cooling reduces brain hyperactivity, which is proposed to be the cause of primary insomnia. The sample size is small, but if we're not seeing the effects of statistical noise here, this is
much more effective than any current treatment, including the most powerful chemicals, and it's both non-invasive and completely safe.
The scientist who discovered this technique seems to really believe in it. So much so that he quit his professorship at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine to
found a company to market it. The device is not yet available to purchase, seemingly due to the requirement for further trials, but it has in fact been
patented.
I do not see anything that is novel in the equipment or set-up here, only the application. So, rather than suffer more years of my life damaged by insomnia waiting for the device (no doubt absurdly overpriced) to become available from a monopoly supplier, I want to build one myself and see if it works.
I am planning a preliminary experiment simply placing
cold packs inside my pillow, but it seems that really you want to cool the front of the head, and that is a little more difficult. It would also be good to be able to control the temperature and to keep it constant all night, since a particular problem I have is waking up after 5-6 hours: not enough for a good night's sleep, but enough for the cool packs to have warmed up a lot!
Unfortunately I know little or nothing about water cooling. Basically, I am wondering if there's a cheap off-the-shelf device (perhaps from the hard core computer gaming side) that can produce and maintain a fixed chosen temperatures in the range of 10-20 degrees Celsius, with a malleable heat diffuser? I guess provided it's reasonably malleable, I can easily hold it in place by cannibalising a hat. One thing that would be key is low noise output, since a noisy room will also affect sleep.
