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Things To Do While You Sleep: Improve Learning and Memory
It is one thing to learn a new piece of information, such as a new phone number or a new word, but quite another to get your brain to file it away so it is available when you need it.
A new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience by researchers at the University of York and Harvard Medical School suggests that sleep may help to do both.
The scientists found that sleep helps people to remember a newly learned word and incorporate new vocabulary into their “mental lexicon”.
Credit: Wikipedia
During the study, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, researchers taught volunteers new words in the evening, followed by an immediate test. The volunteers slept overnight in the laboratory while their brain activity was recorded using an electroencephalogram, or EEG. A test the following morning revealed that they could remember more words than they did immediately after learning them, and they could recognise them faster demonstrating that sleep had strengthened the new memories.
This did not occur in a control group of volunteers who were trained in the morning and re-tested in the evening, with no sleep in between. An examination of the sleep volunteers’ brainwaves showed that deep sleep (slow-wave sleep) rather than rapid eye movement (REM) sleep or light sleep helped in strengthening the new memories.
When the researchers examined whether the new words had been integrated with existing knowledge in the mental lexicon, they discovered the involvement of a different type of activity in the sleeping brain. Sleep spindles are brief but intense bursts of brain activity that reflect information transfer between different memory stores in the brain — the hippocampus deep in the brain and the neocortex, the surface of the brain.
Memories in the hippocampus are stored separately from other memories, while memories in the neocortex are connected to other knowledge. Volunteers who experienced more sleep spindles overnight were more successful in connecting the new words to the rest of the words in their mental lexicon, suggesting that the new words were communicated from the hippocampus to the neocortex during sleep.
Co-author of the paper, Professor Gareth Gaskell, of the University of York’s Department of Psychology, said: “We suspected from previous work that sleep had a role to play in the reorganisation of new memories, but this is the first time we’ve really been able to observe it in action, and understand the importance of spindle activity in the process.”
These results highlight the importance of sleep and the underlying brain processes for expanding vocabulary. But the same principles are likely to apply to other types of learning.
Lead author, Dr Jakke Tamminen, said: “New memories are only really useful if you can connect them to information you already know. Imagine a game of chess, and being told that the rule governing the movement of a specific piece has just changed. That new information is only useful to you once you can modify your game strategy, the knowledge of how the other pieces move, and how to respond to your opponent’s moves. Our study identifies the brain activity during sleep that organises new memories and makes those vital connections with existing knowledge.”
The paper ‘Sleep spindle activity is associated with the integration of new memories and existing knowledge’ is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Source: University of York
Full bibliographic information
Sleep Spindle Activity is Associated with the Integration of New Memories and Existing Knowledge
Jakke Tamminen,1 Jessica D. Payne,2 Robert Stickgold,3 Erin J. Wamsley,3 and M. Gareth Gaskell1
1Department of Psychology, University of York, York YO10 5DD, United Kingdom, 2Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, and 3Center for Sleep and Cognition, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts 02215
The Journal of Neuroscience, October 27, 2010, 30(43):14356-14360; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3028-10.2010
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The study states: Sleep Spindle Activity is Associated with the Integration of New Memories and Existing Knowledge. However some people can remember large amounts of new information that doesn’t connect to existing knowledge because it doesn’t exist. Amazingly the brain works backwards connecting new information with prior unconnected new information finding a relationship between memories despite not having knowledge of the subject matter. This would also make an interesting study.
I let the radio play all night as I sleep. the Coastotcoastam radio show on my Toronto Radio station CFMJ640AM plays all night with George Noory and his guests. I sleep thur the last 3 hours and the next night when the radio station plays last nights show again I listen live and awake. Guess what? I always have the feeling I heard that conversation with his guest before. I wonder why…. I wonder why…..