Cell: can adjusting the brain's sleep swings help with learning?

October 5, 2019 / biourn / -- different patterns of electrical activity in the sleep brain may affect whether we remember what we learned the day before, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco In this study, scientists can affect the ability of rats to learn new skills by regulating the brain waves when they sleep, which has potential application value in enhancing human memory or forgetting traumatic experience In the new study, published online October 3 in the journal Cell, a team led by Dr Karunesh Ganguly, associate professor of Neurology and a member of the Weill Institute of Neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco, used optogenetics to regulate certain types of brain activity during sleep in rats (image source: www Pixabay Com) this allows researchers to identify two distinct types of slow brain waves, called slow oscillations and trigonometry, that are seen during sleep, which enhance or decrease the activity of specific brain cells involved in recently learned skills "We were surprised to find that by reducing these different types of brain waves during sleep, learning outcomes can be better or worse," Ganguly said Trigonometry is an important part of sleep, but there are few studies on them We believe that these two types of slow waves compete with each other during sleep to determine whether we remember or forget to learn new knowledge " Ganguly added: "linking certain types of brain waves to 'forgetting' is a new concept There are more researches on enhancing memory, less researches on forgetting, and they often study each other in isolation Our data shows that there is constant competition between the two: the balance between the two determines that we will remember or forget one thing " In the past two decades, more and more research results support the idea that sleep plays an important role in memory formation Animal studies have shown that neurons involved in initial memory formation reactivate during sleep to consolidate these memory traces in the brain Many scientists believe that forgetting is also an important function of sleep: perhaps a way to "clean" the mind by eliminating unimportant information Sources of information: managing specific brain waves in sleep shifts balance between learning or forgetting a new skill original sources: jaekyung Kim, tanuj Gulati, karuneh Ganguly Competing roles of slow operations and delta waves in memory consolidation versus forgetting Cell, 2019; 179 (2): 514 doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2019.08.040