Brainwave Patterns During Sleep Impact on Ability to Learn New Tasks

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), have shown how the balance between two types of electrical activity in the sleeping brain can influence whether animals remember or forget tasks that were learned the previous day. The scientists found that by using a technique known as optogenetics to dampen the activity of specific neurons in sleeping rats, they could influence how well the animals were able to learn a new skill. The findings hint at the potential to boost human memory, or help the brain to forget traumatic experiences. “We were astonished to find that we could make learning better or worse by dampening these distinct types of brain waves during sleep,” said research lead Karunesh Ganguly, MD, PhD, an associate professor of neurology and member of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences. “… We believe these two types of slow waves compete during sleep to determine whether new information is consolidated and stored, or else forgotten.” The authors report on their studies in Cell , in a paper titled, “ Competing Roles of Slow Oscillations and Delta Waves in Memory Consolidation versus Forgetting .” Sleep is known to be important for selective memory consolidation, and also for forgetting experiences, the authors explained. Animal studies have shown that the same neurons involved in forming the initial memory of a new task or experience are reactivated during sleep to consolidate these memory traces in the brain. It’s commonly thought that our ability to forget is also an important function of sleep. However, what scientists don’t yet know is what governs the balance between the two. “This question is of fundamental importance,” they suggested, “as the nervous system constantly faces the challenge of whether and how to selectively preserve the neural correlates of new experiences through memory consolidation, while […]

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