out of sync brain waves

[Mugwump]

Out-of-sync brain waves may explain why we get forgetful as we age

By Roni DenglerDec. 14, 2017 , 1:10 PM

Our brains don't rest when we sleep. Electrical waves ripple through our noggins as our neurons talk to each other. Now, researchers have shown that when these waves don't interact properly, we can lose our long-term memory. The work may help explain why older adults are so forgetful, and it could lead to new therapies to treat memory loss.

To find out how sleep contributes to memory loss in old age, Randolph Helfrich, a neuroscientist at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, and his team gave healthy 70- and 20-year-olds a memory test. Participants were trained to match 120 common, short words—for example, "bird"—with nonsense words made of combinations of random syllables, like "jubu." Once they learned the word-nonsense word combos, the volunteers played a version of the game "memory." They had to match the word pairs twice: once about 10 minutes after they'd mastered the task, and again a few hours after waking from a full night's rest. While they slept, researchers recorded the electrical activity in their brains.

As expected, the older adults' ability to remember the word pairs in the morning was worse than their young counterparts'. The electrical recordings revealed one reason. Two kinds of brain waves—slow oscillations, large undulations that promote restorative sleep, and sleep spindles, transient bursts of short waves—are tell-tale marks of deep, typically dreamless, non–rapid eye movement sleep. But these waves are out of sync in older people, the researchers report today in Neuron. This out-of-step activity, they say, interrupts communication between the parts of our brains that store short- and long-term memories. In effect, Helfrich says, the prefrontal cortex where long-term memories are stored needs to tell the hippocampus—the part of the brain where all memories go first—that it's ready to receive information; if brain waves aren't in sync, this communication gets lost. So do the memories.

[Ron Sower]

Out-of-sync brain waves may explain why we get forgetful as we age

By Roni DenglerDec. 14, 2017 , 1:10 PM

Our brains don't rest when we sleep. Electrical waves ripple through our noggins as our neurons talk to each other. Now, researchers have shown that when these waves don't interact properly, we can lose our long-term memory. The work may help explain why older adults are so forgetful, and it could lead to new therapies to treat memory loss.

To find out how sleep contributes to memory loss in old age, Randolph Helfrich, a neuroscientist at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, and his team gave healthy 70- and 20-year-olds a memory test. Participants were trained to match 120 common, short words—for example, "bird"—with nonsense words made of combinations of random syllables, like "jubu." Once they learned the word-nonsense word combos, the volunteers played a version of the game "memory." They had to match the word pairs twice: once about 10 minutes after they'd mastered the task, and again a few hours after waking from a full night's rest. While they slept, researchers recorded the electrical activity in their brains.

As expected, the older adults' ability to remember the word pairs in the morning was worse than their young counterparts'. The electrical recordings revealed one reason. Two kinds of brain waves—slow oscillations, large undulations that promote restorative sleep, and sleep spindles, transient bursts of short waves—are tell-tale marks of deep, typically dreamless, non–rapid eye movement sleep. But these waves are out of sync in older people, the researchers report today in Neuron. This out-of-step activity, they say, interrupts communication between the parts of our brains that store short- and long-term memories. In effect, Helfrich says, the prefrontal cortex where long-term memories are stored needs to tell the hippocampus—the part of the brain where all memories go first—that it's ready to receive information; if brain waves aren't in sync, this communication gets lost. So do the memories.

...this is amazing work!...