RSS Feed
June 26th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda MONDAY, June 25 (HealthDay News) — External stimulation during
sleep can help strengthen memory, which, in turn, can help you learn, a
new study reports.
Researchers from Northwestern University noted that such stimulation
could reinforce what people have already learned, but doesn’t help them
gain new skills.
“The critical difference is that our research shows that memory is
strengthened for something you’ve already learned,” the study’s co-author,
Paul Reber, associate professor of psychology at Northwestern, said in a
university news release. “Rather than learning something new in your
sleep, we’re talking about enhancing an existing memory by reactivating
information recently acquired.”
In conducting the study, researchers taught participants how to play
two musical tunes by pressing certain keys at certain times. After they
learned how to play the artificially generated tunes, the participants
took a 90-minute nap. While they slept, only one of the songs was played.
The soft musical cues, the researchers noted, were played during slow-wave
sleep, a stage of sleep that is linked to storing memories.
As the participants napped, the researchers recorded their electrical
brain activity using electroencephalography. After they woke up, the
participants made fewer mistakes when playing the tune that was played
while they were sleeping than the one that was not played.
“Our results extend prior research by showing that external stimulation
during sleep can influence a complex skill,” the study’s senior author,
Ken Paller, professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and
Sciences at Northwestern, said in the news release.
“We also found that electrophysiological signals during sleep
correlated with the extent to which memory improved,” added lead author
James Antony, of the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program at
Northwestern. “These signals may thus be measuring the brain events that
produce memory improvement during sleep.”
The researchers said they are investigating how their findings could
possibly be applied to other types of learning, such as studying a foreign
language. They noted their research could also lead to more studies on
sleep-based memory-processing involving other types of skills, habits and
behaviors.
The study was published June 24 in the journal Nature
Neuroscience.
More information
The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke provides
more information on the brain and how it works.
Posted in 
Tags: 
