Scientists find way to strengthen memories during sleep

If exclusive we could attain more constructive use of every the time that we spend asleep. People hit proven playing various tapes to themselves patch they're dozing, from foreign vocab lists to stop-smoking mantras, but they're every the wrong lateral of useless. What we do know for sure is that rest is important for module consolidation, if exclusive we could tap into this somehow. Now, finally, John Rudoy and colleagues hit provided whatever artful evidence for how learning during rest can be enhanced.

Twelve participants looked on as fifty objects appeared one at a time in various locations on a machine screen. Importantly, as apiece goal appeared it was attended by a symptomatic noise - for example a felid appeared with a cry and a kettle with a whistle. Several rounds of learning took place until the participants had estimated the inexact location of apiece goal at least once. A final pre-nap effort was then performed so that the researchers knew how substantially participants knew apiece goal location before they went to sleep.

That the participants had nodded off was confirmed with mentality gesture recordings via scalp electrodes. But here's the clever bit. As the participants dozed off into non-REM slow-wave sleep, the researchers played the sounds related with 25 of the objects. The objects that were cued in this way were carefully chosen such that pre-nap module performance had been equal for cued and un-cued objects.

The participants woke up after most an distance and the exciting finding is that though their overall module quality was lower compared with before the nap, their performance for the objects cued whilst they slept was superior to un-cued objects, even though pre-nap performance for the digit goal groups had been equal.

The researchers also looked backwards at the mentality gesture signals recorded during sleep, comparing the brain's response to sounds related with objects that were better remembered on waking qualifying to objects for which module had deteriorated. They institute the mentality had responded more to sounds belonging to better remembered objects. \"We propose that sound cues presented during rest prompted preferential processing of corresponding object-location associations,\" the researchers said.

For sceptics who conceive the results may hit nothing to do with sleep, the researchers repeated the noise cueing exercise with twelve participants who remained awake. In their case, sounds presented after learning made no difference to subsequent module performance.

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Rudoy, J., Voss, J., Westerberg, C., & Paller, K. (2009). Strengthening Individual Memories by Reactivating Them During Sleep. Science, 326 (5956), 1079-1079 DOI: