Word: wave
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Much to the researchers' surprise, the greatest improvements appeared in those who spent the most time in the second stage of non-REM sleep. Other procedural tasks that depended more heavily on visual or perceptual ability required periods of deeper sleep or both slow-wave and REM sleep. Sometimes even just an hour of shut-eye made a big difference. Other times a full night's rest was needed. "It's probably going to turn out that different types of memory tasks need different kinds of sleep," says Stickgold...
...SLOW-WAVE LEARNING...
Better equipment HAS ALSO GIVEN researchers a new respect for what can be accomplished during slow-wave sleep. In a study published in July in Nature, Wisconsin's Tononi and others showed that a specific part of the brain that had been busy learning a new skill while awake needed much more slow-wave sleep in order to improve performance...
...good. But what does it mean? Tononi speculates that instead of strengthening neural connections responsible for a given task, as appears to happen during the day or in REM sleep, slow-wave sleep actually indiscriminately weakens the connections among all nerves. The idea sounds counterintuitive, but it may simply be a matter of self-preservation. "Normally the brain takes up 20% of the energy of the entire body," Tononi explains. Most of that energy goes into sustaining the connecting points, or synapses, between neurons. The more you learn, the greater the number of synapses...
...take a neuroscientist to figure out where that leads. After a few days, the number of new synapses in the brain would require more energy than the body could possibly supply. So some of those connections must be weakened--and the best guess is that it happens during slow-wave sleep...