Sentences with phrase «sleep spindles»

Staresina along with Scott Cairney at the University of York, UK, suspected that experimental reactivation of memories might lead to a surge of sleep spindles in a sleeping person's brain.

The findings add to evidence for an important information - processing role of sleep spindles in the service of memory consolidation, the researchers say.

This is the first study to show that manipulating sleep spindle oscillations at the right timing affects memory.

Mednick and UC San Diego psychologists Erik J. Kaestner and John T. Wixted determined that a sleep feature known as sleep spindles — bursts of brain activity that last for a second or less during a specific stage of sleep — are important for emotional memory.

A new study reports that people who can sleep through anything show more frequent bursts of brain activity called sleep spindles than do their light - sleeping counterparts.

Studies in animals also linked sleep spindles to the process by which the brain makes new connections.

Now researchers reporting in Current Biology on March 8 have found that sleep spindles also play a role in strengthening new memories when newly learned information is played back to a person as they sleep.

The study — «Pharmacologically Increasing Sleep Spindles Enhances Recognition for Negative and High - arousal Memories» — appears in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

As a memory is being consolidated, Muller and Sejnowski hypothesize, circular sleep spindle waves help form the links between these different aspects of a single memory.

Previous studies showed that the more sleep spindles a human brain exhibits overnight, the more numbers one would remember the next day.

«There are also disorders including schizophrenia that affect sleep spindles, so this is really an interesting topic to keep studying.»

But many questions about the link between sleep spindles and reactivated memories during sleep remained.

But until now, researchers had not considered sleep spindles as playing a role in emotional memory, focusing instead on rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.

Sleep spindles happen only during sleep, when brain waves slow.

In contrast, sleep spindles did not occur during high frequency stimulation.

Although the specific role of thalamocortical sleep spindles in memory function is poorly understood, correlative evidence has linked spindles with memory replay.

The neuronal activity was characterized during sleep spindles.

That process of memory consolidation is associated with sudden bursts of oscillatory brain activity, called sleep spindles, which can be visualized and measured on an electroencephalogram (EEG).

Stage 2 lasts slightly longer, around 20 minutes, and is marked by rapid bursts of rhythmic brain activity known as sleep spindles.

Sleep endophenotypes of schizophrenia: slow waves and sleep spindles in unaffected first - degree relatives

«Thus, direct induction of sleep spindles — for example, via transcranial electrical stimulation — perhaps combined with targeted memory reactivation, may enable us to further improve memory performance while we sleep.»

The research release explains that «sleep spindles,» a particular kind of brain activity that occurs in sleep, may help us tag and then recall important information.

Sleepers who tolerated louder sounds before waking showed a higher frequency of «sleep spindles» — short bursts of activity of specific wavelength — during non-REM sleep than those who woke more easily.

«Sleep spindles have been associated with memory formation in humans for quite some time but nobody knew what they were actually doing in the brain.

Scientists had long believed that each sleep spindle oscillation peaked at the same time everywhere in the neocortex of the brain.

Sleep spindles are half - second to two - second bursts of brain activity, measured in the 10 - 16 Hertz range on an EEG.

They determined that sleep spindles, not REM, affect emotional memory.

When they crunched the ECoG data from each night, the researchers were in for a surprise: the sleep spindles weren't peaking simultaneously everywhere in the cortex.

«We know that sleep spindles are involved in declarative memory — explicit information we recall about the world, such as places, people and events,» she explained.

Sleep spindles — a type of brain wave pattern known to occur in the earliest stages of non-REM sleep — are associated with memory consolidation.

But exactly how these sleep spindles related to memory was unclear, and scientists were limited by the fact that electrodes could only detect these spindles at one place in the brain at a time.

As expected, the researchers saw that memory cues led to an increase in sleep spindles.

«While it has been shown previously that targeted memory reactivation can boost memory consolidation during sleep, we now show that sleep spindles might represent the key underlying mechanism,» says Bernhard Staresina of the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.

Research Mednick published earlier this year demonstrated the critical role that sleep spindles play in consolidating information from short - term to long - term memory in the hippocampus, located in the cerebral cortex of the brain.

Using two commonly prescribed sleep aids — zolpidem and sodium oxybate (Xyrem)-- Mednick, Kaestner and Wixted were able to tease apart the effects of sleep spindles and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep on the recall of emotional memories.

The spindle - thalamus link made it «logical that the sleep spindle would play a role in regulating sensory input while we sleep,» says Jeffrey Ellenbogen, a sleep researcher at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

These markers of light sleep known as «sleep spindles» occur during a sleep phase that repeats throughout the night in which body metabolism slows and the brain rests (contrary to rapid eye movement sleep, when the brain is active and dreams).

Sleep spindles are wax and waning brain oscillations at a frequency range of 11 - 16 Hz, lasting 0.5 - 2 s, that define non-rapid eye movement sleep stage 2.