Nov 26, 2008

Science - Deep sleep ups creativity,memory


"Not only do we need to remember to sleep, but most certainly we sleep to remember," is how William Fishbein, a cognitive neuroscientist at the City University of New York, put it at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience last week. Scientists increasingly are focusing less on sleep duration and more on the quality of sleep, what's called sleep intensity, in studying how sleep helps the brain process memories so they stick. Particularly important is "slow-wave sleep", a period of very deep sleep that comes earlier than better-known REM sleep, or dreaming time.





That brings us back to fragmented sleep, whether from aging or apnea. It can suppress cell birth in the hippocampus, where memory-making starts — enough to hinder learning weeks after sleep returns to normal, warns Dennis McGinty of the University of California, Los Angeles.

McGinty found that rats with disturbed sleep could only randomly stumble upon an escape hole in a maze that their counterparts detected easily by using room cues.

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