Tag : Stimulation

Washington: While it is well known that sleep is important for memory consolidation, scientists are still attempting to figure out how this process occurs in the brain overnight. New research led by scientists at UCLA Health and Tel Aviv University provides the first physiological evidence from inside the human brain supporting the dominant scientific theory on how the brain consolidates memory during sleep. Further, the researchers found that targeted deep-brain stimulation during a critical time in the sleep cycle appeared to improve memory consolidation. The research, published June 1 in Nature Neuroscience, could offer new clues for how deep-brain stimulation during sleep could one day help patients with memory disorders like Alzheimer's disease, said study co-author Itzhak Fried, MD, PhD. This was achieved by a novel "closed-loop" system that delivered electrical pulses in one brain region precisely synchronized to brain activity recorded from another region. According to the dominant theory for how the brain converts new information into long-term memories during shuteye, there's an overnight dialogue between the hippocampus - the brain's memory hub - and the cerebral cortex, which is associated with higher brain functions like reasoning and planning. This occurs during a phase of deep sleep, when brain waves are especially slow and neurons across brain regions alternate between rapidly firing in sync and silence. "This provides the first major evidence down to the level of single neurons that there is indeed this mechanism of interaction between the memory hub and the entire cortex," said Fried, the director of epilepsy surgery at UCLA Health and professor of neurosurgery, psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffe ...