Word: sleeping
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...shower cap with a jungle of wires sticking out of it - that tracked their brain waves in order to determine their stage of slumber. Using an electroencephalogram (EEG), investigators monitored the sleepers' brain activity, and just when the squiggly lines on the screen showed that participants had entered deep sleep, researchers began playing a series of 25 of the sounds that the individual had heard earlier in the memory game. "[The volume] was a little over a whisper, probably much [quieter] than ... your iPod," says John Rudoy, one of the study's authors and a graduate student at Northwestern...
When the participants woke up about an hour later, they said they hadn't heard a thing. But the test results suggested otherwise. On average, each person did slightly better at remembering the correct locations of the 25 objects whose related sounds had been cued during sleep than those of the other objects. The sounds appeared to have entered the sleeping brain and helped consolidate associated memories...
Many researchers who study sleep and memory were excited by this new study (not to mention purveyors of nighttime subliminal-message CDs that purport to make you quit smoking or love yourself) - but experts acknowledge that more work needs to be done. "I would consider this a very, very small effect," says Paller, so don't expect to be able to boost your SAT score while sleeping just...
...nearly two centuries, researchers have suspected that sleep plays an important role in learning and memory. But it's only in the last decade that neuroscientists have discovered the most convincing evidence that memory is indeed dependent on sleep. The prevailing theory is that during deep sleep, the brain replays certain experiences from the day, which, in turn, strengthens the memory of what happened. It is thought that when it comes to factual memories, like names, faces, numbers or locations, memory consolidation happens only during deep sleep - a phase of non-rapid eye movement sleep. (The other broad type...
...minority of neuroscientists disagree that sleep actively aids memory, suggesting instead that consolidation of memories is merely a side effect of snoozing. They argue that the true purpose of sleep is to "cool down" the brain by resting the neurons that have been firing all day long. Paller's study lends support for the majority view: when sounds were played to the sleeping brain, the EEG patterns indicated activity - signaling that perhaps certain memories were being revisited - and this processing appeared to strengthen memories. "The meow somehow stimulated the association of the cat with a certain position on the screen...