Neuroscience
The New York Times article Study Uncovers Memory Aid: A Scent During Sleep says that smells may help us remember things better. They quote a study recently published in Science:
"The smell of roses — delivered to people’s nostrils as they studied and, later, as they slept — improved their performance on a memory test by about 13 percent."
Or this, from the Science magazine abstract:
"Sleep facilitates memory consolidation. A widely held model assumes that this is because newly encoded memories undergo covert reactivation during sleep. We cued new memories in humans during sleep by presenting an odor that had been presented as context during prior learning, and so showed that reactivation indeed causes memory consolidation during sleep. Re-exposure to the odor during slow-wave sleep (SWS) improved the retention of hippocampus-dependent declarative memories but not of hippocampus-independent procedural memories. Odor re-exposure was ineffective during rapid eye movement sleep or wakefulness or when the odor had been omitted during prior learning. Concurring with these findings, functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed significant hippocampal activation in response to odor re-exposure during SWS."
The Times article explains it in plain English, and the article in Science explains the scientific detals.
New York Times article:
Study Uncovers Memory Aid: A Scent During Sleep
By BENEDICT CAREY, March 9, 2007
A familiar scent can help a slumbering brain better remember things that it learned the evening before.
research at Science (subscription required for the full-text, or check your local library)
Odor Cues During Slow-Wave Sleep Prompt Declarative Memory Consolidation
Björn Rasch, Christian Büchel, Steffen Gais, and Jan Born
Science 9 March 2007: 1426-1429.
"In humans, a new memory formed in the presence of an odor is consolidated faster when the odor is used to induce neural activity in the hippocampus during subsequent sleep."
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Neuroscience
Scents & Sleep
The New York Times article Study Uncovers Memory Aid: A Scent During Sleep says that smells may help us remember things better. They quote a study recently published in Science:
"The smell of roses — delivered to people’s nostrils as they studied and, later, as they slept — improved their performance on a memory test by about 13 percent."
Or this, from the Science magazine abstract:
"Sleep facilitates memory consolidation. A widely held model assumes that this is because newly encoded memories undergo covert reactivation during sleep. We cued new memories in humans during sleep by presenting an odor that had been presented as context during prior learning, and so showed that reactivation indeed causes memory consolidation during sleep. Re-exposure to the odor during slow-wave sleep (SWS) improved the retention of hippocampus-dependent declarative memories but not of hippocampus-independent procedural memories. Odor re-exposure was ineffective during rapid eye movement sleep or wakefulness or when the odor had been omitted during prior learning. Concurring with these findings, functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed significant hippocampal activation in response to odor re-exposure during SWS."
The Times article explains it in plain English, and the article in Science explains the scientific detals.
New York Times article:
Study Uncovers Memory Aid: A Scent During Sleep
By BENEDICT CAREY, March 9, 2007
A familiar scent can help a slumbering brain better remember things that it learned the evening before.
research at Science (subscription required for the full-text, or check your local library)
Odor Cues During Slow-Wave Sleep Prompt Declarative Memory Consolidation
Björn Rasch, Christian Büchel, Steffen Gais, and Jan Born
Science 9 March 2007: 1426-1429.
"In humans, a new memory formed in the presence of an odor is consolidated faster when the odor is used to induce neural activity in the hippocampus during subsequent sleep."
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While you sleep your brain learns. Research with rats has shown how they rehearse maze-routes in their brains whilst they're dozing. And human research has demonstrated that learned material is better recalled after a sound sleep as opposed to a disturbed...
- Slumber Quality Important For Learning
It's not just the amount of sleep we get that is so important for learning, but the quality of that sleep. That's according to a new study that made precise use of beeping noises to disrupt deep "slow-wave" sleep among 13 elderly participants...
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Lack of sleep impairs the human brain's ability to store new information in memory, researchers have found. Past research has already shown that sleep is vital for consolidating recently-learned material but now Matthew Walker and colleagues have...
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Having a nap is a great way to consolidate your memory for what you’ve just learned. Now it appears researchers have found a way to boost this beneficial effect. A control condition confirmed the benefits of sleep: 13 participants remembered 37.42 words...
- Sleep Now
["... Now" is a short post of cog sci topics in the news] Last week, the New York Times had several articles on sleep. You can see the list at Bora Zivkovic's A Blog Around the Clock blog: Sleeping with the New York Times. David Corcoran of the New...