Sleep enhances memory consolidation

We currently live in a sleep-deprived society, due to stressful jobs, irregular working shifts etc. that can lead to hippocampal function and memory impairments. Scientists Ralitsa Todorova and Michaël Zugaro at the Collège de France focus on the importance of sleep and its great impact on stabilizing our memories while we sleep. The hippocampus during active periods of sleep has the capacity to spontaneously reactivate itself and transmit information to the cortex for memory consolidation. They focused on the silence period during sleep of rats’ brains that emitted delta waves in which a small group of neurons that were involved when the spatial memory task took place and remained active and isolated for long-term memory formation. During the period in which the hippocampus was reactivating memory traces to the cortex it was also determining the group of active neurons of the delta waves that reorganized the cortical circuits for long-term memory and allowed rats to do well at the spatial task.

Scientists know now that sleep is essential for memory consolidation and it involves reactivation of memory traces, however, the neurocognitive mechanisms of that process are still unknown. Eitan Schechtman et al. from the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University has been studying sleep-related reactivation with TMR (targeted memory reactivation) by presenting subjects after a spatial-memory task with auditory cues (for some sets of items) during sleep that enhanced their memory compared to the non-cue items. They concluded that the neural mechanism for the auditory cue items with TMR led to the reactivation of multiple memory items concurrently in parallel and individualistically in humans’ brains to enhance their memory.

In conclusion, these findings emphasize the importance of sleep to positively impact the neuronal connectivity in the brain for memory consolidation Scientists have shown that the tool TMR has the potential to enhance memory consolidation. There are new studies arising with the use of TMR during sleep with the hope to use it as a beneficial method for example for children to improve their school performance.

Works cited:

Schechtman, E., Antony, J. W., Lampe, A., Wilson, B. J., Norman, K. A., & Paller, K. A. (2019). Multiple memories can be simultaneously reactivated during sleep as effectively as a single memory. doi: 10.1101/662015

CNRS. (2019, October 18). A new discovery: How our memories stabilize while we sleep. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 26, 2019 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191018125514.htm