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Matti Narkia

How to unleash your brain's inner genius - life - 03 June 2009 - New Scientist - 0 views

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    Savants - individuals with conditions that result in remarkable mathematical, artistic or musical talents - are extremely rare. But new findings about how their formidable brains work hint that we might all be able to develop similar abilities
Tero Toivanen

Naps, Learning and REM : The Frontal Cortex - 0 views

  • Taking a nap without REM sleep also led to slightly better results. But a nap that included REM sleep resulted in nearly a 40 percent improvement over the pre-nap performance.
  • The study, published June 8 in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that those who had REM sleep took longer naps than those who napped without REM, but there was no correlation between total sleep time and improved performance. Only REM sleep helped.
  • Numerous studies have now demonstrated that REM sleep is an essential part of the learning process. Before you can know something, you have to dream about it.
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  • The breakthrough came in 1972, when psychologist Jonathan Winson came up with a simple theory: The rabbit brain exhibited the same pattern of activity when it was scared and when it was dreaming because it was dreaming about being scared. The theta rhythm of sleep was just the sound of the mind processing information, sorting through the day's experiences and looking for any new knowledge that might be important for future survival. They were learning while dreaming, solving problems in their sleep.
  • Wilson began his experiment by training rats to run through mazes. While a rat was running through one of these labyrinths, Wilson measured clusters of neurons in the hippocampus with multiple electrodes surgically implanted in its brain. As he'd hypothesized, Wilson found that each maze produced its own pattern of neural firing. To figure out how dreams relate to experience, Wilson recorded input from these same electrodes while the rats were sleeping. The results were astonishing. Of the 45 rat dreams recorded by Wilson, 20 contained an exact replica of the maze they had run earlier that day. The REM sleep was recapitulating experience, allowing the animals to consolidate memory and learn new things. Wilson's lab has since extended these results, demonstrating that "temporally structured replay" occurs in both the hippocampus and visual cortex.
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    Taking a nap without REM sleep also led to slightly better results. But a nap that included REM sleep resulted in nearly a 40 percent improvement over the pre-nap performance
Tero Toivanen

Let me sleep on it: Creative problem solving enhanced by REM sleep - 0 views

  • "Participants grouped by REM sleep, non-REM sleep and quiet rest were indistinguishable on measures of memory," said Cai. "Although the quiet rest and non-REM sleep groups received the same prior exposure to the task, they displayed no improvement on the RAT test. Strikingly, however, the REM sleep group improved by almost 40 percent over their morning performances."
  • The study by Sara Mednick, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego and the VA San Diego Healthcare System, and first author Denise Cai, graduate student in the UC San Diego Department of Psychology, shows that REM directly enhances creative processing more than any other sleep or wake state. Their findings will be published in the June 8th online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
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    "Participants grouped by REM sleep, non-REM sleep and quiet rest were indistinguishable on measures of memory," said Cai. "Although the quiet rest and non-REM sleep groups received the same prior exposure to the task, they displayed no improvement on the RAT test. Strikingly, however, the REM sleep group improved by almost 40 percent over their morning performances."
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