Students who listened to Beethoven during lecture -- and in dreamland -- did better on test
But scores on the material nine months later dropped to 'floor level'
April 7, 2020
Science Daily/Baylor University
College students who listened to classical music by Beethoven and Chopin during a computer-interactive lecture on microeconomics -- and heard the music played again that night -- did better on a test the next day than did peers who were in the same lecture, but instead slept that evening with white noise in the background.
Over the long haul -- when students took a similar test nine months later -- the boost did not last. Scores dropped to floor levels, with everyone failing and performance averaging less than 25% percent for both groups. However, targeted memory reactivation (TMR) may aid during deep sleep, when memories are theorized to be reactivated and moved from temporary storage in one part of the brain to more permanent storage in other parts, researchers said.
The study, supported by the National Science Foundation and conducted by Baylor's Sleep Neuroscience and Cognition Laboratory (SNAC), is published in the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.
"All educators want to teach students how to integrate concepts, not just memorize details, but that's notoriously difficult to do," said Michael K. Scullin, Ph.D., director of Baylor's sleep lab and assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience. "What we found was that by experimentally priming these concepts during sleep, we increased performance on integration questions by 18% on the test the next day. What student wouldn't want a boost or two to their letter grade? The effects were particularly enhanced in participants who showed heightened frontal lobe activity in the brain during slow wave sleep, which is deep sleep."
He noted that the effects emerged when using gold standard procedures: neither participants nor experimenters knew who received a particular treatment, sleep was measured using EEG in a laboratory setting, and the learning materials matched those that would actually be used in a college classroom, in this case an undergraduate microeconomics lecture.
Poor sleep is widespread in college students, with 60 percent habitually sleeping fewer than the recommended seven hours on 50 to 65 percent of nights. While students may be more concerned about immediate test results -- and TMR may help them cram for an exam -- learning by rote (item memory) does not normally benefit grasping and retaining a concept.
For the study, researchers recruited 50 college students ages 18 to 33 for a learning task with a self-paced, computer-interactive lecture; and for two overnight polysomnography sessions, with the first night an adaptation to the lab and screening for sleep disorders, and the second done the evening of the lecture.
During the lecture, soft background selections were played from a computer: the first movement of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Piano Sonata, the first movement of Vivaldi's "Spring" Violin Concerto and Chopin's Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9, No. 2.
That night in Baylor's sleep lab, research personnel applied electrodes and used computers to monitor sleep patterns of both test and control groups. Once technicians observed a person was in deep sleep, they played either the classical music or the white noise -- depending on whether the individual was in the test or control group -- for about 15 minutes.
"Deep slow wave sleep won't last super long before shifting back to light sleep, so we couldn't play them endlessly," Scullin said. "If we played it during light sleep, the music probably would have awoken participants. The first slow wave cycle is the deepest and longest."
The music choice was important, researchers said.
"We ruled out jazz because it's too sporadic and would probably cause people to wake," Scullin said. "We ruled out popular music because lyrical music disrupts initial studying. You can't read words and sing lyrics -- just try it. We also ruled out ocean waves and ambient music because it's very easy to ignore. You're going to have a heck of a time forming a strong association between some learning material and a bland song or ambient noise.
"That left us with classical music, which many students already listen to while studying," he said. "The songs can be very distinctive and therefore pair well with learning material."
In the microeconomics exam the next day, the TMR of classical music more than doubled the likelihood of passing the test when compared with the control condition of white noise.
Scullin cautioned against confusing the Baylor study's findings with the so-called "Mozart Effect" -- the finding that having students listen to Mozart pieces led to better scores on intelligence tests. Subsequent tests of the "Mozart Effect" found that it either did not replicate or that boosts were strictly due to increased arousal when listening to energetic music.
"Mozart doesn't make memories," Scullin said.
Previous researchers have found that memories associated with sensory cues -- such as an odor or song -- are re-activated when the same cue is received later. When that happens during deep sleep, the corresponding memories are activated and strengthened, said co-researcher Chenlu Gao, a doctoral candidate of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor.
Early experimenters also played audio tapes during sleep to test whether individuals can learn new knowledge while sleeping. But while those experiments failed to create new memories, "our study suggests it is possible to reactivate and strengthen existing memories of lecture materials during sleep," Gao said.
"Our next step is to implement this technique in classrooms -- or in online lectures while students complete their education at home due to COVID-19 social distancing measures -- so we can help college students 're-study' their class materials during sleep."
"We think it is possible there could be long-term benefits of using TMR but that you might have to repeat the music across multiple nights," Scullin added. "After all, you wouldn't just study material a single time and then expect to remember it months later for a final exam. The best learning is repeated at spaced-out intervals -- and, of course, while maintaining good sleep habits."
*The study was supported by the National Science Foundation. Paul Fillmore, assistant professor of communication sciences and disorders in Baylor's Robbins College of Health and Human Sciences, also was a co-researcher.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200407072720.htm
The brain puts the memories warehouse in order while we sleep
March 15, 2018
Science Daily/FECYT - Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology
During the hours of sleep the memory performs a cleaning shift. A study reveals that when we sleep, the neural connections that collect important information are strengthened and those created from irrelevant data are weakened until they get lost.
Throughout the day, people retain a lot of information. The brain creates or modifies the neural connections from these data, elaborating memories. But most of the information we receive is irrelevant and it does not make sense to keep it. In such a case, the brain would be overloaded.
So far there have been two hypotheses about how the sleeping brain modifies the neural connections created throughout the day: while one of them argues that all of them are reinforced during sleep hours, the other maintains that their number is reduced.
A group of scientists from the Ole Paulsen Laboratory, at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), has analyzed the mechanisms underlying the maintenance of memory during the phase of slow wave sleep -- the third phase of sleep without rapid eye movements in the brain during which there is more relaxation and a deeper rest.
"Depending on the experiences of a person and depending on their relevance, the size of their corresponding neuronal connections changes. Those that save important information are smaller and those that store the dispensable are larger," explains Ana González Rueda, main author of the study and researcher at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge.
According to the expert, in the event that all these links were reinforced equally during sleep, the brain would be saturated by an extreme overexcitement of the nervous system.
In the study, published in the Neuron journal, the researchers stimulated the neuronal connections of mice subjected to a type of anesthesia that achieves a brain state similar to the slow wave sleep phase in humans.
In the words of González Rueda, the stimulation was carried out 'blindly' because the information contained in each of the links was not known. "We developed a system to follow the evolution of a specific neuronal synapse and thus study what type of activity influences that these are maintained, grow or decrease."
What isthe maintenance of neural connections dependent on?
The results show that during slow wave sleep, the largest connections are maintained while the smaller ones are lost. This brain mechanism improves the signal-to-noise ratio -- important information remains and the dispensable is discarded -- and allows the storage of various types of information from one day to the next without losing the previous data. That is, those that have already been considered relevant are kept in that state without having to reinforce them. According to González Rueda, the brain "puts order" during the hours of sleep, discarding the weakest connections to ensure stronger and consolidated memories.
"Although the brain has an extraordinary storage capacity, maintaining connections and neuronal activities requires a lot of energy. It is much more efficient to keep only what is necessary," says the expert. "Even without maintaining all the information we receive, the brain spends 20% of the calories we consume."
This research is a first indication of the electro-physiological mechanism of sleep and opens new horizons thanks to the development of a new way of studying live synaptic plasticity.
The next objective of the experts is to research the consequences of this type of brain activity for the maintenance of certain information and to analyze new phases of sleep. "In addition to the analysis of the slow wave phase, it could be interesting to know what happens in the REM phase, during which dreams occur," concludes González Rueda.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180315110640.htm
Sleep selectively stores useful memories: brain evaluates information based on future expectations
February 1, 2011
Science Daily/Society for Neuroscience
After a good night's sleep, people remember information better when they know it will be useful in the future, according to a new study in the Feb. 2 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings suggest that the brain evaluates memories during sleep and preferentially retains the ones that are most relevant.
"Our results show that memory consolidation during sleep indeed involves a basic selection process that determines which of the many pieces of the day's information is sent to long-term storage," Born said. "Our findings also indicate that information relevant for future demands is selected foremost for storage."
Some, but not all, of the volunteers were allowed to sleep between the time they learned the tasks and the tests. As the authors expected, the people who slept performed better than those who didn't. But more importantly, only the people who slept and knew a test was coming had substantially improved memory recall.
The researchers also recorded electroencephalograms (EEG) from the individuals who were allowed to sleep. They found an increase in brain activity during deep or "slow wave" sleep when the volunteers knew they would be tested for memory recall.
"The more slow wave activity the sleeping participants had, the better their memory was during the recall test 10 hours later," Born said. Scientists have long thought that sleep is important in memory consolidation. The authors suggest that the brain's prefrontal cortex "tags" memories deemed relevant while awake and the hippocampus consolidates these memories during sleep.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110201172603.htm
Memory Links to 40 Winks
July 6, 2010
Science Daily/Washington University in St. Louis
When it comes to executing items on tomorrow's to-do list, it's best to think it over, then "sleep on it," say psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis.
People who sleep after processing and storing a memory carry out their intentions much better than people who try to execute their plan before getting to sleep. The researchers have shown that sleep enhances our ability to remember to do something in the future, a skill known as prospective memory.
Moreover, researchers studying the relationship between memory and sleep say that our ability to carry out our intentions is not so much a function of how firmly that intention has been embedded in our memories. Rather, the trigger that helps carry out our intentions is usually a place, situation or circumstance -- some context encountered the next day -- that sparks the recall of an intended action.
The researchers found that participants who tested in the morning following sleep overwhelmingly performed the prospective memory task better in the semantic category test, or context, than in the other two, and they found no such correlation in the group who tested sleepless.
The crux of the finding rests on the fact that the prospective memory instruction was given right after the semantic category practice. In this context, those who slept remembered the prospective memory intention better than in the other categories.
"Sleep promoted the remembering to do the prospective memory task when that one context was present, but not when some other context was present," McDaniel says. "That's because of temporal contiguity -- the fact that the participants were told to hit that 'Q' button right after they were exposed to the semantic category context.
"The idea is that the semantic category test is weakly associated with the prospective memory intention -- it's weakly floating around in the mind and becomes weakly associated with the prospective memory test," McDaniel says.
To return to the colleague and message analogy, because before sleeping you remembered you had a message to deliver to your colleague and you would see him in the conference room tomorrow, sleep enhances the likelihood that you will tell him in the conference room, but not in some other context, the office, elevator, the mail room, for example.
The researchers believe that the prospective memory process occurs during slow wave sleep -- an early pattern in the sleep cycle -- involving communication between the hippocampus and cortical regions. The hippocampus is very important in memory formation and reactivation and the cortical regions are keys to storing memories.
"We think that during slow wave sleep the hippocampus is reactivating these recently learned memories, taking them up and placing them in long-term storage regions in the brain," Scullin says. "The physiology of slow wave sleep seems very conducive to this kind of memory strengthening."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100630162359.htm