How Sleep Helps Memory

 There is no longer any doubt. Sleep does improve the gelling or consolidation of memory for recently encoded information. Research is now focusing on how this happens and what other factors interact with the sleep effect. At least two processes seem to be at work: 1) sleep protects new memories  from disruption by the interfering experiences that are inevitable during wakefulness, and 2) sleep consolidates memories according to their relative importance and the learner’s expectations for remembering.

A good illustration of reducing interference comes from a study of napping at the University of Lübeck in Germany. The researchers knew about the extensive evidence that in wakefulness, new situations and stimuli can readily prevent new memories from consolidating. This is even true when learned material is recalled, because at that point the memory has to be reconsolidated and is therefore again vulnerable. The authors assumed that similar interference with memory formation could occur even after a sleep interlude.

To test the idea, they asked 24 volunteers to memorize  the two-dimensional location of 15 pairs of cards with pictures of animals and everyday objects. During the study time, they were also exposed continuously to a slightly unpleasant odor, which was intended to be an associational cue.

Forty minutes later, the volunteers were asked to learn a second, slightly different set of card pairs. This second task was to act as an interfering disruptor of the initial learning. The difference is that after the first memorization session, half of the group stayed awake and the other half took a nap. For 20 minutes during the break after the first study session, the odor cue was presented with the intent of helping to reactivate the memory of the first session. The awake group got the odor cue for 20 minutes just before starting the second learning session, while the sleep group got the odor cue during the last 20 minutes of the nap (dreaming did not occur, because it normally requires more than 40 minutes of sleep to start appearing).

When both groups were tested for recall of the first set of cards, the sleep group remembered much better (85% correct versus 60% for the awake group). The explanation begins with the knowledge that when temporary memories (as for the first card set) are recalled, they are vulnerable to being destroyed by new mental activity (as with the second card set). In this study, memory was reactivated in both wakefulness and sleep by the odor cue. Yet, the memorization processes that apparently persisted during sleep made the original memories more resistant to disruption. By the time of the second interfering task some 40 minutes later, much of the initial learning had gelled during sleep, but less so during wakefulness.

These authors also performed brain imaging that showed that the nap group had mostly completed a shift in activity from the temporary processing area (in the hippocampus) to storage areas in the cortex. This was not true for the awake group. You might say that sleep  enabled the information to be “uploaded from RAM to the hard drive” better than in the constant awake condition. Of course this computer metaphor breaks down in other respects. Biological memory is dynamic, readily degraded over time or changed by new experience. Also, recall of biological memory launches a reconstructive process whereby the memory can be reinforced or drastically altered.

        The practical application, as I see it, is to take a short nap as soon as possible after trying to memorize something really important. For example, during a study session for a school exam, take a nap right away so that it has a better chance to consolidate than if you stayed awake and got exposed to many new interfering situations and stimuli.

       Two new studies shed some light on prioritization of memory formation during sleep. We all have had the experience of improved memory if we know others expect us to  remember. I guess such improvement occurs because we work harder at it, using more intensive rehearsal and perhaps using deliberate association strategies..But we now find out from a recent study that the sleep effect on improving memory formation benefits from the relevance of the learned information. Since sleep usually occurs significantly later than the learning and original encoding, this effect must arise from the consolidation  process during sleep.

      A recent study from this same German research lab has revealed that sleep helps memory formation the most if you know you will need the information later. That is, it seems that the brain prioritizes its consolidation operations during sleep to favor consolidation of information that is most important. The study tested 193 volunteers for recall of a variety of memory tasks. Some subjects were exposed to the learning material early in the day, when there would be no sleep involved. The others were exposed to the same material late, just before the night’s sleep. When subjects were told they would be tested later, they were more likely to remember if they had slept immediately after the learning. This was true for both procedural tasks (like finger-tapping sequences) or declarative tasks such as word matching or stating card-pair locations. Moreover, subjects who were told they would be tested later spent more total time in the deepest stage of Sleep (Stage IV) than did comparable subjects who were not told they would be tested later. Presumably, the brain is using Stage IV to accomplish this differential consolidation process.

      In a recent study from a French group, the study focus was on sleep’s apparent ability to prioritize memory formation based on prior instructions to remember or forget items in a learning task. In the learning task, volunteers were shown 100 French words, one at a time. Fifty of these had accompanying instruction “to be remembered” and the other 50 “to be forgotten,” presented in a pseudorandom sequence that prevented more than three words of the same type being presented consecutively. After the training session, subjects were divided into two groups, one which was sent home to continue their normal activities and to sleep on their usual schedule for the  next three nights. The other group was denied the first night’s sleep after training, where they stayed up all that night watching movies or playing games.  Otherwise, this group was treated the same. On the fourth day, both groups were tested for recall with presentation the 100 of the original words and 100 new ones to serve as distracters. The task was to identify which words were in the original list.

      Questionnaires revealed any strategies the subjects used in trying to remember “to be remembered” words and trying to ignore “to be forgotten” words. No subject intensively rehearsed the original items during the three-day interval, but of course casual rehearsal was going on. Generally, subjects made associations of “to be remembered” words with memories of personal events or with short stories or sentences. Mental images were much less used. Of course, no such rehearsals occurred with “to be forgotten” words.

      Upon testing, both groups had about the same degree of correct recall for “to be remembered” words. But the sleep-deprived groups remembered more of the words they were not supposed “to be forgotten.” Thus, it would seem that during sleep, the brain preserved its ability to remember words that were expected to be remembered and discriminated against remembering words that were unimportant. Recall that the instructions to remember or forget were given at the  time of initial encoding. Thus, the brain must have preserved these instructions and followed them in the consolidation process during sleep. Though the authors did not mention it, the poor ability of sleep-deprived subjects to discriminate between the two categories of words could have arisen because being awake for a whole day after learning interfered with remembering and following instructions at the time of encoding.

Don’t forget, if you have students in your life, have them check out my new eBook, “Better Grades, Less Effort.”

Sources:

Diekelmann, S., Büchel, Born, J., and Rasch, Björn. 2011. Labile or stable: opposing consequences for memory when reactivated during wakefulness and sleep. Nature Neuroscience. Jan. 23. doi: 10.1038/nn.2744

Rauchs, G. et al. 2011. Sleep contributes to the strengthening of some memories over others, depending on hippocampal activity at learning. J. Neuroscience.  31 (7): 2563-2568.

Wilhelm, I. et al. 2011. Sleep selectively enhances memory expected to be of future relevance. J. Neuroscience. 31 (5): 1563-1569.

Memory Image-mapping Technique for One-try Learning

Are you as smart as a rat? A rat can learn a lot of things with just the first attempt. For example, in the old days, exterminators used to use poisons such as strychnine. What they discovered was that some rats who ate the bait were never killed. If they survived the seizures of the first exposure, they learned not to eat that particular bait again. It’s called “bait shyness.” As a result, exterminators now use a different poison, Warfarin, that does not kill right away. The rat slowly bleeds to death over many days and does not realize any connection between eating that bait and getting sick. The explanation for the difference is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1.  One-try learning by rats being fed poison. In the top example, using strychnine, the rat gets sick soon after eating the bait. If it survives, it remembers an association between eating that particular kind of food and getting very sick, and it won’t eat the poison ever again. If, however, it takes a while to become sick, as with the anti-coagulant Warfarin, the rat is unable to make a connection between being sick and eating the bait. So, it keeps eating the bait every time it gets hungry.

Similar one-try learning has been demonstrated in two common types of experiments. In one type, the test apparatus is a large box, the floor of which is an electrified grid. In the middle of the floor, there is a safe-island platform that is not electrified. When an untrained rat is placed on this platform, it immediately runs to the walls, because rats feel vulnerable out in open spaces. But of course, the rat gets a learning experience of having its feet shocked. If you take the rat out, put it back in the home cage and re-test it the next day, the rat stays on the safe platform. Despite its natural inclination, it stays on the platform because it learned —in just one try —not to step off that platform.

Another example is a water maze. Put a rat or mouse in a tub of water and it swims desperately about hoping to find some escape. If there is a platform at one end it can climb up on, the rat, once it sees it, swims immediately to the platform and climbs up on it. If there is some kind of indicator of where the platform is, such as a light above it, and you fill the tub with a milky liquid where the platform cannot be seen, an untrained rat swims around until it accidentally finds the platform. Take the rat out, put it in the home cage, and re-test the next day, and the rat swims immediately to where the light and the safe platform is. Learning has occurred in just one try.

In all such learning situations there is one huge caveat. That deals with what happens immediately after the one-try learning. If some new learning situation occurs at that time, the learning will be disrupted and not formed into a lasting memory. For example, the memory will not form if in the foot shock or swim maze case immediately after the learning the investigator  puts the rat in another learning situation or even just some distracting situation, such as putting the rat into a cage with strange rats rather than returning it to the home cage. Re-testing the next day will indicate that the rat never learned. Actually, it just forgot, because new stimuli immediately after learning interfere with forming a lasting memory.

This is the most common explanation of failure for humans to remember new learned events. After all learning events, a certain amount of uninterrupted time is needed to “consolidate” the short-term memory into a more lasting one.

Now consider how the rats might learn these things in one try. They have no language. The must surely rely on what they see. That is they must be making an association with something they see out in space: a certain kind of food that made them sick, a grid of bars that shocked their feet, a light cue showing where a safe platform was located. So, objects and where they are in space are powerful memory aids.

Memory gimmicks often use some kind of mapping technique, such as associating what you want to remember with location of objects in a room. I have discussed these in my book, Thank You Brain for All You Remember. Now I have a new and better image-mapping technique for one-try learning. I include it free in a revision of my e-book for students, Better Grades, Less Effort. The technique can be applied to most anything, is easy to use, and the maps are adjustable for any number of objects or ideas to be remembered. Moreover, sequential ordering is built-in. You can get the ebook for only $2.49 in all formats from Smashwords.com (http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/24623). 

Attention Deficit Returns As You Get Older

"PAY ATTENTION!" is a phrase teachers have to repeat again and again to youngsters. Whether or not attention deficit is of clinical magnitude, most kids have to learn how to pay attention. What you may not know is that this problem returns for most people as they become Senior Citizens.

Does any of this sound familiar: “Where did I put those keys?” “What was it I wanted when I opened the frig door?” "What was that phone number I just looked up?” These memory problems happen because you get distracted and lose attention.

A brain-scan study at the University of Toronto found that older people, compared to young adults, have decreased brain activity in brain areas that enable concentration This means that older brains can’t focus well, because the parts of the brain that enable concentration don’t get active enough.

To compound the problem, older people show increased activity in parts of the brain that don’t normally get activated during memory tasks in younger people. The explanation for this is that the brains of older people need to assign the attentiveness and memory work to more parts of brain. That is, they have to recruit more circuitry to do the same job young brains can do with fewer brain resources.  However, you look at it, the findings document an age-related decline in the brain's ability to focus its neural resources on memory tasks. What may be most worrisome is that the brain shows such signs of decline around age 40.

 Another study at the University of Illinois examined age-related increase in distractibility. Researchers recorded brain electrical responses in young adults and old subjects (65-78) who were listening to distracting bursts of sound. In young people, brain responses to repeated, irrelevant tones were quickly suppressed but responses to distracting sound were more persistent in older adults.              
Yet another study, this one from the U. California at San Francisco, confirmed that older people tend to have difficulty in ignoring distractions and irrelevant stimuli. Subjects performed a memory task of ignoring a previous stimulus that was still in working memory. In other words, the subject had to suppress the memory of irrelevant stimuli. The results showed that older individuals could focus on pertinent information but had difficulty in ignoring irrelevant or distracting information that was contained in working memory. However, about half of the older adults did not have this problem. So let us not come away with the conclusion that memory deficits in the elderly are inevitable.

Enough already! What you would really like to know is what to do about attention deficit if you have it.

One general approach is to keep your brain working hard as you age. Good examples include chess or learning a new language or a musical instrument. Think of it like exercise for the brain, which strengthens the neural circuits in those parts of the brain that have to do the memory work and distinguish irrelevant from relevant information.

Another general strategy is to reduce the distractions in our life, at least distractions that are present when we are trying to remember something. Multi-tasking is hard enough to do when you are young. On those occasions when I forget why I opened the refrigerator door, it is always because I let myself get distracted between the time I decided what I wanted and the time when I opened the door.

          Focus, focus, focus. We older people need to work at paying attention. Here are some tips on how to do that:

·   Assign importance to paying attention and remembering. If you don’t think something is important, your brain won’t commit enough circuitry to handle the information.

·   Expect and demand of yourself successful remembering. Make forgetting unacceptable.

·   Work with small chunks of information at any one time. By lowering the memory load, the brain’s limited resources can deal with it more effectively.

·   Be interested in what you are trying to remember. Don’t let it be boring. Boring is a state of mind that you can do something about.

·   Get engaged with the information. Ask yourself or others questions about it. Think about it in different ways.

·   Try to stay rested, alert, and sharp. Nobody focuses well when they are tired.

   

To summarize, the best way to pay attention is through force of will. To remember, you have to want to remember and accordingly force yourself to pay attention.

Copyright 2010, W. R. Klemm

 

Here is a note you might want to know about if you have children or grandchildren in school. I just published an e-book, Better Grades. Less Effort. It is priced so all kids can afford it. There are now three reviews, and all vigorously endorse the book.  See my Web, thankyoubrain.com for the reviews and more information.

Nice review of "Better Grades. Less Effort."

I just saw a nice review was just posted at the Barnes and Noble site.

 

 

Bill

Learning In School. The "Problem with No-child Left Behind"

I see two main problems, one with the philosophy and one with the means of learning assessment.

As for philosophy, it sounds good, but like many social engineering efforts by the government, there are major unintended consequences that are too destructive. In this case, leaving no child behind has the effect of "no child pushed forward." In order to save kids who don't care about learning or whose parents don't care, we manipulate the whole system so that kids who are conscientious and who have talent are neglected. These kids don't pull down the schools' average scores on high-stakes testing, so they are left mostly to fend for themselves. The emphasis, which borders on compulsive, is on bringing up the bottom, so the school and teachers won't look so bad.

Worse yet is the unavoidable tendency to teach to the state standards and the test that is based on them. This not only engenders a "drill and kill" negative attitude among students, but many teachers just leave out most other enriching instruction that is not likely to get tested. For years, all of science was largely ignored in my state of Texas, because the high-stakes testing was restricted to English and math.

Also, the state standards are not infallible. In Texas, I know many educators who think the standards lack adequate rationale and coherence, especially across grade levels. States develop their standards by putting together a committee to write them. Such committees can be very opinionated, driven as much by ideology as by logic.

Then there is the assessment process of high-stakes testing. The President of the U.S. National Academy of Education, Professor Lorrie Shepard, recently argued that scores on these tests can be increased without any corresponding increase in learning or skills. This has been verified by use of other independent measures of the same content.

There is also the assumed necessity of using multiple-choice testing because so many schools and kids are involved. As an expert on memory, I can assure you that multiple-choice tests are the least reliable way to assess knowledge and understanding. More complex indicators of learning are needed, and this is recognized by the new, but very limited new program of "Race to the Top."

Shepard says if you really want to know whether education is being improved, especially in math and science, you have to evaluate such things as solving non-routine problems, to assess the reliability and meaning of evidence, apply knowledge in different contexts, and to communicate their learning effectively, both orally and in writing, In general, our schools don't do that.

Good teachers know how to assess learning without multiple-choice testing. They know how to structure student work requirements so that meaningful assessment is possible. In the old days, that is what teachers were expected to do. Today, they are expected to make sure the class scores high-enough on the state tests. A better approach, I submit, is to require students to create portfolios that reflect their ability to solve non-routine problems, evaluate evidence, and to apply and communicate their understanding. Then, these portfolios could be reviewed anonymously by an outside group, perhaps by educators in other schools, who in turn subject in reciprocal manner the portfolios of their own students to similar review.

Source:
Shepard, L. A. 2010. Next-generation assessments. Science. 330: 890.

Neuroscience research working for you

I just attended the 40th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego. There were over 31,000 scientists there, about 20,000 of whom presented research findings.Attendees come from all over the world. I an a Charter member of the Society and attended the first and most of the other annual meetings. It is hard for "outsiders" to appreciate just how much has changed in brain research over that time. The first meeting had less than 1,000 attendees. Now the meeting is so big that only a handful of U.S. cities can host such a large meeting.

There were many papers on memory presented. Most, however, were focused on how the brain achieves memory, and a lot of that has no immediate practical application for everyday life. I keep an eye out for such papers and report them in this blog when I find it.

One paper confirmed what I already knew about teaching "old dogs new tricks."  It showed that learning of a series of items was impaired in Seniors compared to younger people, but the deficiency was overcome if the experimenters just increased the interval between presentation of items. In other words, you CAN teach old dogs new tricks, it just takes longer.

I was really excited to see that I am on the right track on my new book, due out from Springer next Spring. The book is titled "Atoms of Mind. The 'Ghost in the Machine' Materializes." A few scientists are starting to do  the kind of research I advocate in the book for the study of consciousness. While at the meeting, I got a new idea nobody has considered yet. I'll tell people about it in the book, which I am mailing off to the publisher in a week or so..

I presented a paper on why people dream. A commonly accepted idea is that we dream to consolidate memories of the preceding day's events  It is true that memory consolidation does occur in sleep, both dream and non-dream sleep. But that is not the CAUSE of either dreaming or non-dreaming sleep. It is the consequence.

The simple answer is that we dream because the brain becomes activated in what is called REM sleep. Activated brains want to think, and thinking during sleep is expressed as dreams. So the real question I addressed is why do we have REM sleep. It's a long story, but the short answer is that REM helps to re-boot a sleeping brain so that we can become awake and conscious again. My presentation was well received. I had 50 copies of handouts, and they were scarfed up in the first 30 minutes of my poster session. Lots of people left their e-mail address so I could mail them copies of the poster. Over 100 people came by the poster. And they weren't window shopping. They stayed, read it all, and discussed it with me during the time when I was attending the poster. Nobody could punch any holes in the theory. I think I have the best explanation anybody has every presented.

It has been a stimulating four days. I will need some time to unwind.

B Vitamins, Brain Shrinkage, and Memory

I have discussed nutritional effects on memory and warned readers that many claims are just so much undocumented hype. Here is a study, apparently very well done by a group at Oxford University, that shows supplementing diet with B vitamins can help prevent mental decline in the elderly.

As people age, the brain tends to atrophy, even in healthy people, and this of course can contribute to mental decline and senility. A risk factor for brain atrophy in the elderly is homocysteine, an amino acid best known as being a risk factor for coronary heart disease, stroke and peripheral vascular disease. B vitamins (folic acid, B6 and B12) reduce the blood level of homocysteine. In the Oxford study, 271 people over 70 years old with mild cognitive impairment were given a mixture of the B vitamins daily for two years. Brain size changes were monitored with brain scans.

During the test period, brains shrunk 1.08% in the non-supplemented controls and 0.76% in those that got the B vitamins. There were correlated changes in blood homocysteine levels and performance on mental tests.  Daily doses used were folic acid: 0.8 mg; B6: 20 mg; and B12: 0.5 mg.(I just checked my own brand-name one-a-day multi-vitamin pills, and they have a lot less of B6 and B12.)

If brains shrink at this rate (actually shrinkage probably accelerates over time), the difference by age 90, for example, would be substantial. Shrinkage would be even greater if there were other factors such as large alcohol consumption or Alzheimer's disease. One could also expect B vitamins to provide some benefit for the cardiovascular system, though this was not evaluated in this study.

Source:

Smith, A. D. et al. 2010. Homocystein-lowering by B vitamins slows the rate of accelerated brain atrophy in mild cognitive impairment: a randomized controlled trial. PLoS ONE. doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0012244

Better Grades. Less Effort

What can be more important to a student than to have good memory skills? The same is true for working professionals in information-dense specialties (like law, medicine, science, engineering, etc.). Memory ability helps workers master their field and become more competent -- and more likely to be successful.

I have just released a short new e-book, Better Grades, Less Effort. The book explains the memory tips and tricks I used to become valedictorian, an Honors student in three universities (including graduating with a D.V.M. degree), and to secure a PhD in two-and-a-half years. I also share what I have learned about student learning over 47 years as a professor.

The ideas in the book are directed to students in high school or college. Parents are urged to explain these ideas to their elementary-school children.  My experience with students leads me to conclude that poor memory is what holds most students back from superior achievement.  I claim that the ideas in this book can change a student’s future, as indeed has been validated in my own life.

The other thing I have learned as a Professor is that most students think they know more about how to learn than they really do. In elementary and secondary schools, the emphasis of teaching is on WHAT to learn, not HOW to learn. By the time students get to college, professors mistakenly assume they already know how to learn.

My relevant experience also includes being a researcher and teacher of neuroscience, an interdisciplinary field focused on how the brain works, including how it learns and remembers. I have actually conducted memory research, on lab rats and college sophomores. The principles are the same. Sometimes, the rats do better than the people. Unlike lab rats, which are really pretty good at learning and remembering, humans have a huge repertoire of behaviors and experiences that interfere with remembering. Many of the tips explain what I mean.

Better Grades explores 20 core  ideas about improving memory in a few pages for each idea. The book’s structure is itself an example of some core ideas. For example, ideas are grouped according to common category: Attitudes and Approach, Classroom and Study Environment, Memory Principles and Processes, plus a General  Tips section with three ideas that don’t fit into the above categories. At the end of each group, there is a “tying it all together” section that uses mental-image mnemonics to help readers remember what they just read in the preceding section. At the end of the book, a similar approach helps the reader remember the whole book.

I claim that If readers do what this book says, they will be able to memorize:

1. all the key ideas of this book,
2. any list up to 100 items,
3. dates and numbers,
4. the essence of what  is on every page — by page number — of any short book,
5. a class presentation or speech without notes,

plus, as promised, they will get better grades with less effort.

The book is priced at $2.49 so that every student can afford it. My whole point in creating the book is to help as many people as possible. Access to information and a free chapter can be found at http://thankyoubrain.com. All e-reader formats are supported, including pdf for reading on computers.