Neuroscience
From the Science website:
Asleep at the Memory Wheel
By Greg Miller
ScienceNOW Daily News
18 October 2006
ATLANTA, GEORGIA--Going a night without sleep may cause your hippocampus to go on strike. A new study has caught this crucial memory-encoding brain region slacking off in college students the day after they've pulled an all-nighter. The study is one of the first to investigate how sleep deprivation interferes with memory mechanisms in the human brain.
Neuroscientist Matthew Walker of Harvard University and his colleagues paid 10 undergraduate students to forgo a night's sleep. The next day, the students viewed a series of 30 words, and two days later--after having two nights to catch up on their sleep--the students returned to the lab and took a test to see how well they remembered the words they'd seen.
The students recalled about 40% fewer words overall than a group of 10 students who had slept normally, Walker reported here yesterday at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. But the researchers also found that the emotional content of the words made a big difference in what people remembered. Previous studies have found that both positive and negative emotions bolster memory, but in the current study, negatively charged words (such as cancer or jail) seemed to penetrate the sleep-deprived brain more deeply than positive ones (such as happy or sunshine). Indeed, sleep-deprived students were only 19% worse than their well-rested counterparts at remembering negative words, but 59% worse
for positive words. Walker suspects the difference may reflect an evolutionary safeguard against forgetting potential threats.
[ ... Read the full article ... ]
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Neuroscience
Sleep Deprivation and Learning
From the Science website:
Asleep at the Memory Wheel
By Greg Miller
ScienceNOW Daily News
18 October 2006
ATLANTA, GEORGIA--Going a night without sleep may cause your hippocampus to go on strike. A new study has caught this crucial memory-encoding brain region slacking off in college students the day after they've pulled an all-nighter. The study is one of the first to investigate how sleep deprivation interferes with memory mechanisms in the human brain.
Neuroscientist Matthew Walker of Harvard University and his colleagues paid 10 undergraduate students to forgo a night's sleep. The next day, the students viewed a series of 30 words, and two days later--after having two nights to catch up on their sleep--the students returned to the lab and took a test to see how well they remembered the words they'd seen.
The students recalled about 40% fewer words overall than a group of 10 students who had slept normally, Walker reported here yesterday at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. But the researchers also found that the emotional content of the words made a big difference in what people remembered. Previous studies have found that both positive and negative emotions bolster memory, but in the current study, negatively charged words (such as cancer or jail) seemed to penetrate the sleep-deprived brain more deeply than positive ones (such as happy or sunshine). Indeed, sleep-deprived students were only 19% worse than their well-rested counterparts at remembering negative words, but 59% worse
for positive words. Walker suspects the difference may reflect an evolutionary safeguard against forgetting potential threats.
[ ... Read the full article ... ]
- 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...
- Electric Stimulation Boosts Beneficial Effect Of Sleep On Memory
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...
- You're Feeling Very Sleepy
Just thinking that they’ve not had much sleep could interfere with the daytime functioning of imsomniacs, regardless of whether they actually had enough sleep or not. Twenty-two students (average age 21 years) with primary insomnia were recruited by...
- Olfaction, Memory, And Sleep
From today's New York Times: Scent Activates Memory During Sleep, Study Says By BENEDICT CAREY The New York Times Published: March 8, 2007 Scientists studying how sleep affects memory have found that the whiff of a familiar scent can help a slumbering...
- 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...