hippocampus tagged posts

Students sometimes pull an all-nighter to prepare for an exam. However, research has shown that sleep deprivation is bad for your memory. Now, University of Groningen neuroscientist Robbert Havekes discovered that what you learn while being sleep deprived is not necessarily lost, it is just difficult to recall.

Together with his team, he has found a way to make this “hidden knowledge” accessible again days after studying while sleep-deprived using optogenetic approaches, and the human-approved asthma drug...

What role do the stages of sleep play in forming memories? “We’ve known for a long time that useful learning happens during sleep,” says University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Anna Schapiro. “You encode new experiences while you’re awake, you go to sleep, and when you wake up your memory has somehow been transformed.”

Yet precisely how new experiences get processed during sleep has remained mostly a mystery. Using a neural network computational model they built, Schapiro, Penn Ph.D. student Dhairyya Singh, and Princeton University’s Kenneth Norman now have new insight into the process.

In research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they show that as the brain cycles through slow-wave and rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, which happens about five t...

Convergence research project integrated neurobiology with data science techniques. Using experiments and a deep machine learning data analysis approach, scientists uncovered the fundamental workings of the hippocampus region of the brain as it organizes memories into time sequences. The work could help future research into cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and other causes of dementia.

Combining electrophysiological recording techniques in rodents with a statistical machine learning analysis of huge troves of data, the UCI researchers uncovered evidence suggesting that the hippocampal network encodes and preserves progressions of experiences to aid in decision-making. The team’s work is the subject of a paper published recently in Nature Communications.

“Our brain ...

Researchers at the University of Tsukuba found that, despite only covering about one-third of the distance in HIIT compared with that covered in endurance training, similar improvements in exercise capacity and brain function were observed for both forms of exercise.

“We investigated how rats’ muscles and brains — specifically, the region of the brain involved in spatial learning called the hippocampus — adapted to these types of exercise, and how the rats consequently learned and remembered navigating mazes,” explains Professor Hideaki Soya, the principal investigator.

In the experiment, rats were assigned to 1 of 3 groups — resting, endurance running, or alternating intervals (short sprints and rest) — during training sessions on treadmills 5 days/w...