Research brain learns at night while sleeping

The brain learns at night in deep sleep

03/30/2014

Those who sleep poorly or not enough not only risk their health, but are usually also unfocused and have problems with their memory. Deep sleep in particular seems to be particularly important for learning processes.

Sufficient sleep to consolidate what you have learned
People who sleep permanently little or bad risk their health. Complaints such as heart stuttering or tachycardia are often associated with the fact that those affected do not find enough sleep. But not only the body, but also the memory is affected if the person does not come to rest enough. Since adequate and good sleep is important to consolidate what you have learned, it is rather a bad idea to learn until late into the night before difficult exams or tests. However, it is still a mystery even for experts, what happens while sleeping in detail and whether the dream or deep sleep is the decisive factor.

Nocturnal brain activity researched worse
Basically, the nocturnal activities of our thinking body are much less well researched than daytime behavior. „But the brain works at least as complicated at night, probably even more complicated“, Dieter Kunz, chief physician of the clinic for sleep medicine at the St. Hedwig hospital in Berlin. Deep sleep and dream sleep alternate with humans approximately in the 90-Minuten-Rhythmus, whereby the deep sleep phases are longer at the beginning of the night and the dream sleep phases towards morning. Shortly Kunz and his team want in the journal „Sleep“ publish a study that emphasizes the importance of dream or REM sleep, at least for procedural learning, ie the learning of automated processes such as cycling or running. REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement and describes the rapid eye movement under closed eyelid in the dream.

Subjects with REM sleep performed significantly better
The physician explained: „The subjects received an antidepressant that suppresses REM sleep.“ They had to press a button after sleep in visual tests for certain optical signals lightning fast. The subjects from the placebo group, ie those with REM sleep, performed significantly better. Presumably, it is precisely the combination of the different sleep components that stores the facts permanently for explicit learning, for example for vocabulary or history data. However, learning is much more: „The memory that is formed in sleep is not a passive process where, as it were, simply glue over the contents to fix it. It is an active process, an abstraction process away from the individual episode experienced to the semantic memory“, such as the Leibniz Prize winner and sleep researcher Jan Born from the University of Tübingen.

Participants performed better after sleeping
The scientist specifically targeted deep sleep for his latest studies with his team. First, they also admitted their adults and children subjects „Button-Down game“ make, in which at seemingly arbitrary light signals quickly a button had to be pressed. However, the light signals were switched in a complex pattern. This was not noticeable to any of the participants. The second test run came after sleeping. All participants performed much better and the increase was particularly noticeable among the children, who naturally have more deep sleep phases. „Sleep is likely to re-process stimulation. Especially the children had extracted the hidden patterns. Thirteen of the fifteen children knew the entire sequence by heart“, explained Born. „And it is the deep sleep phase in which this happens.“

Deep sleep phases in older people decrease
The sleep researchers made in another attempt to improve the deep sleep phases. It succeeded in slowing down the frequencies with soft tone impulses, which were switched synchronously to the slow delta wave rhythm of the deep sleep brain, to increase the rashes. „The deep sleep gets deeper, the memory becomes bigger“, so born. In the elderly, the deep sleep phases decrease successively. However, the sleep researcher does not see that senior citizens can benefit from a better deep sleep, but also significantly more memory. „You can improve the sleepiness of older people, but the effects are only moderate“, said Born. „The old brain just does not produce so many slow waves anymore.“

Natural instead of chemical sleeping pills
For those who want to learn something overnight, the primary advice is to sleep for at least seven hours in a dark environment and aligned with the internal clock. People who suffer from sleep problems, but should not resort to chemical sleeping pills, which not only make dependent, but often during the day a kind „hangover“ can cause. There are also natural remedies such as valerian extract sleep aids alone or in combination with hops, lemon balm and passion flower. (Ad)