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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."
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

Tests find benefit of sleeping on job - Science, News - The Independent - 0 views

  • A type of dreamy sleep that occurs more frequently in the early morning is important for solving problems that cannot be easily answered during the day, a study has found.
  • The discovery could explain many anecdotal accounts of famous intellectuals who had wrestled with a problem only to find that they have solved it by the morning after a good night's sleep.
  • Scientists believe that a form of dreaming slumber called rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, when the brain becomes relatively active and the eyes flicker from side to side under closed eyelids, plays a crucial role in subconscious problem solving.
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  • In a series of tests on nearly 80 people, the researchers found that REM sleep increases the chances of someone being able to successfully solve a new problem involving creative associations – finding an underlying pattern behind complex information.
  • Those people who had enjoyed REM sleep improved significantly, by about 40 per cent, while the other volunteers who had not had REM sleep showed little if any improvement, according to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
  • The researchers suggest that it is not merely sleep itself, or the simple passage of time, that is important for the solving of a new problem, but the act of being able to fall into a state of REM sleep where the brain slips into a different kind of neural activity that encourages the formation of new nerve connections.
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    A type of dreamy sleep that occurs more frequently in the early morning is important for solving problems that cannot be easily answered during the day, a study has found.
Tero Toivanen

How to Learn in Your Sleep: Scientific American - 3 views

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    Research published today in Nature Neuroscience shows that we can learn entirely new information while we snooze.
Tero Toivanen

Lab Notes : The Brains of Early Birds and Night Owls - 0 views

  • There was no real difference between the early birds and the night owls in their performance on the morning test. But the evening test was a different story: night owls were less sleepy and had faster reaction times than early birds.
  • So even though both groups were sleeping and waking according to their preferred schedule, night owls generally outlasted early birds in how long they could stay awake and mentally alert before becoming mentally fatigued. The fMRI supported the behavioral results: 10.5 hours after waking up, the early birds had lower activity in brain regions linked to attention and the circadian master clock, compared to night owls.
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    A new study, in the journal Science, reports some intriguing differences between the brain-activity patterns of the two types that underlie the behavioral differences.
Tero Toivanen

How To Keep Mentally Fit As You Age | Boost Your IQ - 0 views

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    When you are young and mentally fit, you will perhaps never be able to comprehend that your memory, intelligence and overall mental fitness can actually decline as you age. However, as we grow older, our mental sharpness will gradually decline (and at an increasing rate) if we fail to keep on top of things.
Tero Toivanen

Brain Foundation - Healthy Brain - 0 views

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    The Healthy Brain Program, an initiative of the Brain Foundation, aims to assist Australians to keep their brains healthy into old age, through the provision of community education and research. The program aims to address issues such as: People are living longer, and the prevalence of degenerative brain disorders is increasing. There is little information available about how to keep the brain healthy compared to the wealth of information about a healthy body and heart. There is a need for a coordinated approach to education on key indicators and risk reduction strategies.
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