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If you’ve ever felt guilty of taking a noontime siesta, here’s science coming to your rescue. A new study revealed that napping can boost your ability to learn:
"Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap," said study author Matthew Walker, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
The study involved 39 healthy young adults who were placed into either a nap or no-nap group. At noon, all the participants performed a learning task intended to exercise the hippocampus, a region of the brain that helps store fact-based memories. Both groups performed at comparable levels on this test.
Then at 2 p.m., the nap group took a 90-minute siesta while the no-nap group stayed awake. Later that day, at 6 p.m., participants performed a new round of learning exercises. Those who remained awake throughout the day became worse at learning. In contrast, those who napped did markedly better and actually improved in their capacity to learn.
Princeton neuroscientist David Tank wanted to study individual neurons in a mouse’s hippocamus as it moves. But the movement of the mouse’s body prevented accurate readings. So he placed the mouse on a giant trackball and let it run through a virtual maze from the video game Quake 2 displayed on screens. Brandon Keim writes in Wired:
Studying individual neurons has been possible in cell cultures, but brains in a dish behave different than real, living brains. Tracking individual neurons in moving animals has been impossible.
“The neurons move back and forth while you’re trying to measure things,” said Tank. “So we developed a way to keep the head fixed in space, but still have mice perform behaviors that are usually studied in mice running through a maze.”
Tank’s team designed an apparatus in which a mouse, its head firmly held in a metal helmet, walks on the surface of a styrofoam ball. The ball is kept aloft by a jet of air, so that it functions like a multidirectional treadmill. Around it are sensors taken from optical computer mice, which read the ball’s movement as the mouse runs.
Those readings were the input for the researchers’ virtual reality software — a modified version of the open source Quake 2 videogame engine, tweaked to project an image on a screen surrounding the mouse. Tank called it “a mini-IMAX theater.”
Link via Popular Science
Ever notice when you walk into a room that you know something has changed and it takes a moment to realize what’s missing? Your eyes may know the answer before you do, as simple memory games have shown that your eyes focus on the correct answer before you are able to identify it.
By observing the hippocampus part of the brain, which is responsible for traditional memories, neuroscientists Deborah Hannula and Charan Ranganath noted that persons giving incorrect answers still had increased activity when their eyes observed the correct answer. The prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is responsible for decision making, mirrored the behavior of the hippocampus.
So your hippocampus may have made the connection that the napkin holder is missing, but your PFC must get involved for you to realize it. “The idea is that recollection may be a two-stage process,” Hannula says. “First you have retrieval of the memory, and then you have a conscious appreciation of what’s been retrieved.”
The study provides strong support for the idea that the hippocampus can process relational memories without a person being aware of it, says Boston University neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum.
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