sleep 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...

Too little and too much sleep linked to cognitive decline. Like so many other good things in life, sleep is best in moderation. A multiyear study of older adults found that both short and long sleepers experienced greater cognitive decline than people who slept a moderate amount, even when the effects of early Alzheimer’s disease were taken into account. The study was led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Poor sleep and Alzheimer’s disease are both a...

Sleep increases chromosome dynamics that clear out DNA damage accumulated during waking hours. Why do animals sleep? Why do humans “waste” a third time of their lives sleeping? Throughout evolution sleep has remained universal and essential to all organisms with a nervous system, including invertebrates such as flies, worms, and even jellyfish. But the reason why animals sleep – despite the continuous threat of predators – still remains a mystery, and is considered among the biggest unanswered questions in life sciences.

In a new study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel reveal a novel and unexpected fu...

Jason Gerstner, assistant research professor in WSU’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, is lead author of a Science Advances paper describing a gene involved in the quality of sleep experienced by three different animals, including humans. Credit: Washington State University

Washington State University researchers have seen how a particular gene is involved in the quality of sleep experienced by 3 different animals, including humans. The gene and its function opens a new avenue for scientists exploring how sleep works and why animals need it so badly. As a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin, Gerstner looked at genes that change expression over the sleep-wake cycle and found expression of the gene FABP7 changed over the day throughout the brain of mice...