neocortex tagged posts

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...

We now know sleep has profound implications for lots of human tasks. Sleep improves our memory, and enables us to consolidate new information with the knowledge we already have. Sleep also changes the quality of stored info. We are more likely to adjust our memories slightly so that they fit better with previous experiences after sleeping. And we are more likely to avoid misleading background information in making decisions and judgements. But sleep also has a positive effect on problem solving.

It’s common to feel you can gain inspiration for something overnight. You may have even woken up in the middle of the night with the solution to a problem, whether it be trivial or life-changing. These intuitions turn out to be absolutely correct.

METHOD: Volunteers a set of problems with 3 word...