The brain processes what has been learned during REM sleep. Free Technical Library News

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The brain processes what is learned in REM sleep

24.05.2016

Sleep the night before the exam. But how to do this if noisy neighbors interfere? Just ask them not to disturb your theta rhythms during REM sleep - it's only an hour or two.

In a study published today in the journal Science, neuroscientists tested exactly how the REM phase affects our memory. During REM sleep, the mammalian brain emits theta waves. Influencing the light on the neurons responsible for stimulating the production of these waves, the scientists "turned off" the radiation, and at the same time the animals did not wake up.

Turning lights on and off in the brains of mice is one of the most promising ways to study the brain today. This time, scientists undertook to study the relationship between sleep and memory. It is known that sleep deprivation is bad for health, so conducting such experiments on humans, alas, is unethical - and again, optogenetics in mouse heads helps scientists.

It turned out that the mice, whose sleep was not disturbed by anything, the next day perfectly reproduced what they had learned the day before. The same animals that were "turned off" theta rhythms experienced memory problems - they did not recognize the place where they received an electric shock yesterday, and went there without fear.

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