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 Results of a small study suggest that enhancing electrical brain
waves known as sleep spindles may improve "motor memory," which is
what enables people to remember how to walk, ride a bike, and
perform other routine movements without having to consciously think
about them.
“The results are really exciting, but it’s not yet ready to be done
at home,” said senior author Flavio Frohlich of the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“The results need to be replicated before we can move forward,”
Frohlich told Reuters Health.
The function of sleep spindles - short bursts of electrical activity
in the brain that happen periodically between light and deep sleep -
has not been clear, Frohlich and his colleagues write in Current
Biology.
The research team studied 16 men over three nights of sleep. One
night was used for an initial screening and the other two for the
experiment.
Before falling asleep each night, the men completed word-pairing
tests and motor sequencing tests, which involved repeatedly
finger-tapping a specific pattern.
During the experiment, each man had electrodes placed on his scalp.
On one night, those electrodes delivered through-the-skull
alternating current stimulation, a very weak alternating current of
electricity synchronized with the brain's natural sleep spindles. On
the second night, there was no electrical stimulation, and the
results were used for comparison.
Each morning, the men performed the same word-pairing and
finger-tapping exercises.
There were no side effects of the stimulation, Frolich said, and
participants were unable to tell whether the previous night had been
a stimulation night or a placebo night.
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Word-pairing performance was the same regardless of electrical
stimulation, but performance on the motor task was better after
nights of electrical stimulation, the researchers found.
“This is a fundamental discovery from the perspective of
understanding how the brain works,” and what sleep spindles do, he
said. “Specific electric activity in the brain mediates certain
cognitive processes.”
It’s possible that someday, this type of stimulation could also
restore some cognitive functions for people with memory impairment,
but it's too soon to answer this question, he said. It’s also not
clear how long the effects of stimulation last, given that this was
a two-day intervention, he said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2aMVNhX Current Biology, online July 28, 2016.
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