Slashdot Mirror
Older Adults' Forgetfulness Tied To Faulty Brain Rhythms In Sleep, Study Says (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Older brains may forget more because they lose their rhythm at night. During deep sleep, older people have less coordination between two brain waves that are important to saving new memories, a team reports in the journal Neuron. The finding appears to answer a long-standing question about how aging can affect memory even in people who do not have Alzheimer's or some other brain disease. The study was the result of an effort to understand how the sleeping brain turns short-term memories into memories that can last a lifetime, says Matt Walker, the author of the book Why We Sleep. "What is it about sleep that seems to perform this elegant trick of cementing new facts into the neural architecture of the brain?" To find out, Walker and a team of scientists had 20 young adults learn 120 pairs of words. "Then we put electrodes on their head and we had them sleep," he says. The electrodes let researchers monitor the electrical waves produced by the brain during deep sleep. They focused on the interaction between slow waves, which occur every second or so, and faster waves called sleep spindles, which occur more than 12 times a second. The next morning the volunteers took a test to see how many word pairs they could still remember. And it turned out their performance was determined by how well their slow waves and spindles had synchronized during deep sleep.
Next, the team repeated the experiment with 32 people in their 60s and 70s. Their brain waves were less synchronized during deep sleep. They also remembered fewer word pairs the next morning. And, just like with young people, performance on the memory test was determined by how well their brain waves kept the beat, says Randolph Helfrich, an author of the new study and a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. The team also found a likely reason for the lack of coordination associated with aging: atrophy of an area of the brain involved in producing deep sleep. People with more atrophy had less rhythm in the brain, Walker says.
Next, the team repeated the experiment with 32 people in their 60s and 70s. Their brain waves were less synchronized during deep sleep. They also remembered fewer word pairs the next morning. And, just like with young people, performance on the memory test was determined by how well their brain waves kept the beat, says Randolph Helfrich, an author of the new study and a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. The team also found a likely reason for the lack of coordination associated with aging: atrophy of an area of the brain involved in producing deep sleep. People with more atrophy had less rhythm in the brain, Walker says.
I've noticed my short-term memory is just crap. Working Seattle Hundreds sucks, and it sucks even more at my age.
do u do anything else beside post this racist trash on slashdot?
getting up in the middle of the night to pee doesn't help either.
Nullius in verba
OK, so they did a study comparing young people and old people, where the young people all had smooth skin and high levels of sex hormones, and the old people all were somewhat wrinkled and had lowered levels of sex hormones. The young people remembered more than the old people. Hence, we can obviously conclude that having a smooth skin and a powerful sex drive improves memory.
What's that latin again? Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Sounds so much better than in English: correlation is not causality!
Sure, sure, they found similar correspondences in young and old people, but they still miss this point. Both could have the same independent cause, and indeed in the case of the young people it is rather likely that they do, since presumably they don't have atrophied brain parts that usually produce deep sleep but just didn't sleep deeply anyway!
About the best one can do from this from the sound of it is: Not getting good sleep is bad for your memory.
Wow. That's sure news. Nobody even suspected! And some people don't get good sleep because they drink too much coffee in the evening. And others don't get good sleep because they are in pain all the time. And still others don't get good sleep because they have obstructive sleep apnea. And whaddya know -- some of them have atrophy in a part of the brain that helps produce good sleep.
I was going to say something else about this, but I dozed off for a moment there and now I forgot.
Sorry.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
... what happened while I was asleep?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
So basically younger brains can shake it's booty better.
Meh. Smoke more green.
Short term memory is useless anyway. Toke green herb, sleep better, improve long term memory.
Puff puff, nerds!
thanks for sharing this information with us
From TFA "That's discouraging because atrophy in this area of the brain is a normal consequence of aging, Walker says, and can be much worse in people with Alzheimer's."
I thought the brain deteriorated uniformly. Stem cells might be another promising remedy for the determination.
The only racist cuck here is you, your stupid country goes to shit and you are cheerleading like a true dumbass.
No raging hormone fired erection that just won't go to sleep so you can.
Then there is the 5 AM morning wood.
Things that don't happen when you get older.
So do we know if chemically assisting sleep can help with these brain waves? And further than that, is there something more natural that might help this, like marijuana, or even a low dose of alcohol?
Known to let the beat...
drop!
(CAPTCHA melody)
What is the official unit of measurement for scrotal elasticity? Centipeters per nude ton meater? Mega-hurts per furlong per light-year. Who will volunteer for the non-elastic (i.e. permanent deformation or fracture) measurements?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
No one here knows what you mean by 'cuck'.
That is not a word... which is not to say you are illerterate, although that is the conclusion I choose to draw ;)
Haha alzhy papy too funny haha
I thought the brain deteriorated uniformly.
The older you get, the more varied the ages of cell groups across your body.
It varies because of activity, stress, diet, genetics and everything else.
One of the biggest things that can affect it is diet. A shitty diet causes all kinds of damage to your insides that massively skews the ages of cells across your body, especially your digestive tract.
This is why cancers of the digestive tract are right up there at the top of the charts, and immediate secondary products of the digestive tract (like breast cancer and prostate cancer, another 2 high ones)
Varied age gradients increase cancer risk on top of that. Why that is is still not fully understood.
Case in point, lung cancer, hugely common one that is easily prevented by good diet alone.
A good case of that is Japan. Despite their high smoking incidence, they have low lung cancer rates. This is when you exclude the differences in tobacco between countries, specifically, which was originally thought as the reason.
The biggest issue with diets today is the consumption of toxic ready-made meals. That single thing alone is the biggest issue. The processes that cook them make them both sterile and filled with toxic aldehydes from the high-temp cooking processes and cheapo shit veg oils.
Same happens with snack food too. Pringles only have their shape due to extremely high temperature cooking in, yep, cheapo shit vegetable oils. They are horribly inflammatory.
Inflammation causes persistent scarring over long term, exhausts useful nutrients, damaging stem cells and leading to premature ageing of cell groups, and in turn, varied age gradients across the body.
Eliminating them would fix most common illnesses in the western world in a generation.
Everything else, like dodgy pesticides, all of that is nothing compared to the shit food being produced every second in these massive factories shrouded in secrecy.
They should be banned. All of them. Honestly the worst thing the human race has invented. Worse than biological weapons and chemical weapons. Hell, they ARE those things in a very literal sense.
Are you sure it's just not tied to passing out while watching Fox News?
This explains why my fucking cat wakes me up in the middle of the night EVERY NIGHT. It's part of his evil plan to take control of my household and control the distribution of kibble.
The last laugh's on me asshole, YOU STILL DON'T HAVE THUMBS!
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
"Older brains may forget more /because/ they lose their rhythm at night."
Unless figuring out a way to synchronize those ways IMPROVES memory, there's little way to tell the difference between a cause and a symptom.
It could be that whatever mechanism is causing faulty memory is ALSO causing unsynchronized waves.
To declare "this is why X happens" you need a much higher standard of evidence.
Curiously, and oddly, the slashdot headline is actually more correct - they seem to be RELATED, is all we know so far.
-Styopa
I take 3mg melatonin at night... it helps me sleep but I also have dreams similar to when I was younger. I wonder if there is a relationship? Studies have shown melatonin levels go down as you age.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Ok, as an old phart, my first question is, is there a TREATMENT? Yes, my memory retention has declined. It scares me. In IT, you have to keep up with current technology, which means retaining what you learned. That's become more and more difficult. (Not to the point where I can hide my own easter eggs, though.) Ok, it's good to know a possible cause. What do I do about it? I can't see myself retiring.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
which is not to say you are illerterate , although that is the conclusion I choose to draw ;)
And the same can be said of you.
I was going to respond, but I forgot what I was going to say.
That being said, i just had a Space-OAR inserted for prostate cancer radiation treatment. I've been miserable for the last two weeks, waking up every 2 hours to pee, even if there's absolutely nothing to do; it just FEELS like there is. That being said, the annoying feeling is slowly going away as I get used to it, and I'd MUCH rather have this that the standard balloon alternative it replaces.
Even though it's bothersome as heck for a few weeks ( some discomfort may occur? How about I'm always horizontal and can't sit normally in a chair for 2 weeks?) I'd still glad I did it, even if it's the most annoying thing I've ever done to myself.
Older guys, get checked for prostate cancer. The standard routine examination is quick (kinda like you first time having sex!) and even a scan or biopsy isn't THAT terrible. The earlier you find it the earlier and better they can treat it.
YouTube conclusion. I'd highly recommend this annoying procedure, but ask your doctor. This is FCC approved and new -- if he doesn't know anything about it, GET ANOTHER DOCTOR.
This is not a paid sponsorship or anything, I'm currently just an very annoyed and happy customer who's glad I did it.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?