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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.
getting up in the middle of the night to pee doesn't help either.
Nullius in verba
Dear M. Greenwow,
May I suggest you slow down on smoking the green? There is reports that it affects short term memory. Things might not be so "wow" anymore but at least your short term memory should improve.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
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.
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.