Do you want to have a good memory? Sleep soundly! After all, the phase of REM sleep (REM-phase, when dreams appear and rapid eye movement begins) is directly involved in the formation of memory. Scientists have suggested this more than once, but only recently have it been possible to prove that the activity of neurons responsible for the transfer of information from short-term to long-term memory is critically significant precisely in the REM sleep phase. Scientists at the University of Bern and the Douglas Institute of Mental Health at McGill University made this discovery, which further demonstrates the importance of sound healthy sleep. The results of their research were published in the journal Science, the portal Neurotechnology.rf writes in more detail about it.
Any newly acquired information is first stored in different types of memory, for example, spatial or emotional, and only then is it combined or consolidated, moving from short-term to long-term. “How the brain performs this process has remained unclear until now. For the first time, we were able to prove that REM sleep is extremely important for the normal formation of spatial memory in mice, ”explains one of the authors of the study, Sylvain Williams.
To do this, scientists conducted experiments on mice: rodents in the control group were allowed to sleep as usual, and mice in the experimental group during the REM sleep phase “turned off” the neurons responsible for memory, acting on them with light pulses. After such exposure, these mice did not recognize the objects they had previously studied, as if their memory had been erased.
And here is an extremely important fact, which is noted by the lead author of the study, Richard Boyes: “Turning off these same neurons, but outside of REM sleep episodes, had no effect on memory. This means that neuronal activity during REM sleep is essential for normal memory consolidation. ”
REM sleep is considered an essential component of the sleep cycle in all mammals, including humans. Scientists increasingly associate its poor quality with the appearance of various brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. In particular, REM sleep is often significantly distorted in Alzheimer’s disease, and the results of this study show that such impairment can directly affect memory impairment in “Alzheimer’s” pathology, the researchers say.
In order for the body to spend the time it needs in the REM phase, try to sleep continuously for at least 8 hours: if sleep is interrupted frequently, the brain spends less time in this phase.
You can read a little more about this exciting experiment of scientists below.
- Ji
Hundreds of previous studies have tried unsuccessfully to isolate neural activity during sleep using traditional experimental techniques. This time, the scientists took a different path. They used the recently developed and already popular optogenetic imaging method among neurophysiologists, which allowed them to accurately determine the target population of neurons and regulate their activity under the influence of light.
“We chose those neurons that control the activity of the hippocampus, the structure that forms memory during wakefulness, and the brain’s GPS system,” Williams says.
To test long-term spatial memory in mice, scientists trained rodents to notice a new object in a controlled environment, where there was already an object that they had previously examined and was identical to the new one in shape and volume. The mice spent more time exploring the “novelty”, and thus demonstrated how their learning and remembering what was previously learned was going on.
When these mice were in REM sleep, the researchers used pulses of light to turn off memory-related neurons and determine how this would affect memory consolidation. The next day, these rodents completely failed the task of using spatial memory, not showing even a small fraction of the experience they had received the day before. Compared to the control group, their memory seemed to be erased.