Strengthening individual memories by reactivating them during sleep.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Rudoy JD
PROVIDER: S-EPMC2990343 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Nov
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Strengthening individual memories by reactivating them during sleep.
Rudoy John D JD Voss Joel L JL Westerberg Carmen E CE Paller Ken A KA
Science (New York, N.Y.) 20091101 5956
While asleep, people heard sounds that had earlier been associated with objects at specific spatial locations. Upon waking, they recalled these locations more accurately than other locations for which no reminder cues were provided. Consolidation thus operates during sleep with high specificity and is subject to systematic influences through simple auditory stimulation. ...[more]
Similar Datasets
Project description:Memories are stored in the brain as cellular ensembles activated during learning and reactivated during retrieval. Using the Tet-tag system in mice, we label dorsal dentate gyrus neurons activated by positive, neutral or negative experiences with channelrhodopsin-2. Following fear-conditioning, these cells are artificially reactivated during fear memory recall. Optical stimulation of a competing positive memory is sufficient to update the memory during reconsolidation, thereby reducing conditioned fear acutely and enduringly. Moreover, mice demonstrate operant responding for reactivation of a positive memory, confirming its rewarding properties. These results show that interference from a rewarding experience can counteract negative affective states. While memory-updating, induced by memory reactivation, involves a relatively small set of neurons, we also find that activating a large population of randomly labeled dorsal dentate gyrus neurons is effective in promoting reconsolidation. Importantly, memory-updating is specific to the fear memory. These findings implicate the dorsal dentate gyrus as a potential therapeutic node for modulating memories to suppress fear.
| S-EPMC9468169 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Purpose: To determine the specific effects of 6 hours sleep deprivation after a learning event on the transcriptomes of microglia. Sleep deprivation can generate inflammatory responses in the neuronal environment. In turn, this inflammation increases sleep drive, leading to a rebound in sleep duration. Microglia, a type of support cell found exclusively in the brain, have previously been found to release of inflammatory signals and exhibit altered characteristics in response to sleep deprivation. Together, this suggests microglia may be partially responsible for the brain’s response to sleep deprivation through their inflammatory activity. In this study, we fully and selectively ablated microglia from the mouse brain and assessed resulting sleep, circadian, and sleep deprivation phenotypes. We find microglia are dispensable for both homeostatic sleep and circadian function and the sleep rebound response to sleep deprivation. However, we uncover a phenomenon by which microglia appear to be essential for the protection of synapses and associated memories formed during a period of sleep deprivation, further expanding the list of known functions for microglia in synaptic modulation.
2021-05-12 | GSE174231 | GEO
Project description:Microglia protect memories formed during sleep deprivation
| PRJNA728892 | ENA
Project description:Memory consolidation benefits from sleep. In addition to strengthening some memory traces, another crucial, albeit overlooked, function of memory is to erase irrelevant information. Directed forgetting is an experimental approach consisting in presenting "to be remembered" and "to be forgotten" information that allows selectively decreasing or increasing the strength of individual memory traces according to the instruction provided at learning. This paradigm was used in combination with functional MRI to determine, in humans, what specifically triggers at encoding sleep-dependent compared with time-dependent consolidation. Our data indicate that relevant items that subjects strived to memorize are consolidated during sleep to a greater extent than items that participants did not intend to learn. This process appears to depend on a differential activation of the hippocampus at encoding, which acts as a signal for the offline reprocessing of relevant memories during postlearning sleep episodes.
| S-EPMC3317380 | biostudies-other
Project description:Slow-wave sleep (SWS) is known to contribute to memory consolidation, likely through the reactivation of previously encoded waking experiences. Contemporary studies demonstrate that when auditory or olfactory stimulation is administered during memory encoding and then reapplied during SWS, memory consolidation can be enhanced, an effect that is believed to rely on targeted memory reactivation (TMR) induced by the sensory stimulation. Here, we show that transcranial current stimulations (tCS) during sleep can also be used to induce TMR, resulting in the facilitation of high-level cognitive processes. Participants were exposed to repeating sequences in a realistic 3D immersive environment while being stimulated with particular tCS patterns. A subset of these tCS patterns was then reapplied during sleep stages N2 and SWS coupled to slow oscillations in a closed-loop manner. We found that in contrast to our initial hypothesis, performance for the sequences corresponding to the reapplied tCS patterns was no better than for other sequences that received stimulations only during wake or not at all. In contrast, we found that the more stimulations participants received overnight, the more likely they were to detect temporal regularities governing the learned sequences the following morning, with tCS-induced beta power modulations during sleep mediating this effect.
| S-EPMC6365565 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Sleep and memory are deeply related, but the nature of the neuroplastic processes induced by sleep remains unclear. Here, we report that memory traces can be both formed or suppressed during sleep, depending on sleep phase. We played samples of acoustic noise to sleeping human listeners. Repeated exposure to a novel noise during Rapid Eye Movements (REM) or light non-REM (NREM) sleep leads to improvements in behavioral performance upon awakening. Strikingly, the same exposure during deep NREM sleep leads to impaired performance upon awakening. Electroencephalographic markers of learning extracted during sleep confirm a dissociation between sleep facilitating memory formation (light NREM and REM sleep) and sleep suppressing learning (deep NREM sleep). We can trace these neural changes back to transient sleep events, such as spindles for memory facilitation and slow waves for suppression. Thus, highly selective memory processes are active during human sleep, with intertwined episodes of facilitative and suppressive plasticity.Though memory and sleep are related, it is still unclear whether new memories can be formed during sleep. Here, authors show that people could learn new sounds during REM or light non-REM sleep, but that learning was suppressed when sounds were played during deep NREM sleep.
| S-EPMC5548898 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Our ability to recall memories is improved when sleep follows learning, suggesting that sleep facilitates memory consolidation. A number of factors are thought to influence the impact of sleep on newly learned information, such as whether or not we rehearse that information (e.g. via restudy or retrieval practice), or the extent to which the information is consistent with our pre-existing schematic knowledge. In this pre-registered, online study, we examined the effects of both rehearsal and schematic congruency on overnight consolidation. Participants learned noun-colour pairings (e.g. elephant-red) and rated each pairing as plausible or implausible before completing a baseline memory assessment. Afterwards, participants engaged in a period of restudy or retrieval practice for the pairings, and then entered a 12 h retention interval of overnight sleep or daytime wakefulness. Follow-up assessments were completed immediately after sleep or wake, and again 24 h after learning. Our data indicated that overnight consolidation was amplified for restudied relative to retested noun-colour pairings, but only when sleep occurred soon after learning. Furthermore, whereas plausible (i.e. schematically congruent) pairings were generally better remembered than implausible (i.e. schematically incongruent) pairings, the benefits of sleep were stronger for implausible relative to plausible memories. These findings challenge the notion that schema-conformant memories are preferentially strengthened during post-learning sleep.
| S-EPMC9231735 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Sleep deprivation can generate inflammatory responses in the central nervous system. In turn, this inflammation increases sleep drive, leading to a rebound in sleep duration. Microglia, the innate immune cells found exclusively in the CNS, have previously been found to release inflammatory signals and exhibit altered characteristics in response to sleep deprivation. Together, this suggests that microglia may be partially responsible for the brain's response to sleep deprivation through their inflammatory activity. In this study, we ablated microglia from the mouse brain and assessed resulting sleep, circadian, and sleep deprivation phenotypes. We find that microglia are dispensable for both homeostatic sleep and circadian function and the sleep rebound response to sleep deprivation. However, we uncover a phenomenon by which microglia appear to be essential for the protection of fear-conditioning memories formed during the recovery sleep period following a period of sleep deprivation. This phenomenon occurs potentially through the upregulation of synaptic-homeostasis related genes to protect nascent dendritic spines that may be otherwise removed or downscaled during recovery sleep. These findings further expand the list of known functions for microglia in synaptic modulation.
| S-EPMC8741522 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Memory consolidation is a dynamic process. Reactivation of consolidated memories triggers reconsolidation, a time-limited period during which memories can be modified. Episodic memory refers to our ability to recall specific past events about what happened, including where and when. However, it is unknown whether noninvasive stimulation of the neocortex during reconsolidation might strengthen existing episodic memories in humans. To modify these memories, we applied repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over right lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), a region involved in the reactivation of episodic memories. We report that rTMS of PFC after memory reactivation strengthened verbal episodic memories, an effect documented by improved recall 24 hr postreactivation compared to stimulation of PFC without reactivation and vertex (control site) after reactivation. In contrast, there was no effect of stimulation 1 hr postreactivation (control experiment), showing that memory strengthening is time dependent, consistent with the reconsolidation theory. Thus, we demonstrated that right lateral PFC plays a causal role in strengthening of episodic memories through reconsolidation in humans. Reconsolidation may serve as an opportunity to modify existing memories with noninvasive stimulation of a critical brain region, an issue of fundamental importance for memory research and clinical applications.
| S-EPMC3824257 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Memory consolidation involves the reactivation of memory traces during sleep. If different memories are reactivated each night, how much do they interfere with one another? We examined whether reactivating multiple memories incurs a cost to sleep-related benefits by contrasting reactivation of multiple memories versus single memories during sleep. First, participants learned the on-screen location of different objects. Each object was part of a semantically coherent group comprised of either one, two, or six items (e.g., six different cats). During sleep, sounds were unobtrusively presented to reactivate memories for half of the groups (e.g., "meow"). Memory benefits for cued versus non-cued items were independent of the number of items in the group, suggesting that reactivation occurs in a simultaneous and promiscuous manner. Intriguingly, sleep spindles and delta-theta power modulations were sensitive to group size, reflecting the extent of previous learning. Our results demonstrate that multiple memories may be consolidated in parallel without compromising each memory's sleep-related benefit. These findings highlight alternative models for parallel consolidation that should be considered in future studies.
| S-EPMC7782847 | biostudies-literature