Your students will tell you a lot about you, including your mental state, concentration, alertness, and intelligence. Somewhat surprisingly, they can also tell you a lot about your memories. According to recent research, naturethe size of your pupils while you sleep reveals what you’re thinking and when you’re sleeping, indicating whether you’re ruminating about new or old memories.
“It’s like new learning, old knowledge, new learning, old knowledge, and it fluctuates slowly during sleep,” said Azahara Oliva, one of the authors of the new study and a neuroscientist at Cornell University. said. in a press release. “We propose that the brain has an intermediate time scale that separates new learning from old knowledge.”
read more: How the brain decides which memories to keep and which to discard
Preserve (and save) memories
Researchers have long sought to understand the mechanisms of memory consolidation, including the process by which storing new memories avoids “catastrophic forgetting,” in which old memories are erased.
Wanting to learn more about these mechanisms, the research team focused on pupil size during non-REM sleep, the sleep stage most associated with memory consolidation. During NREM sleep, the eyes tend to remain still, but the pupils oscillate between smaller and larger diameters, reflecting different substages and depth of sleep throughout the NREM sleep stages.
“NREM sleep is when the actual memory consolidation takes place, and this moment is a very short period of time, say 100 milliseconds, that humans cannot detect,” Oliva said in the release. “How does the brain distribute very fast and very short memory screening throughout the night? How do we separate the new knowledge that comes our way?”
Tracking the brain activity and pupil size of sleeping mice, as well as their ability to complete certain tasks while awake, showed that when pupils become smaller during non-REM sleep, new memories are repeated and consolidated. It turns out that old memories are no longer remembered. It repeats as the pupil enlarges.
The results obtained using small brain sensors and cameras reveal how and when new memories are stored without replacing old ones, and could have important implications for future memory research. be.
read more: What happens in your brain when you create memories?
mouse memory
To arrive at their findings, the research team taught mice a myriad of tasks over a month, including how to find water and food in a maze, and then tracked their brain activity and pupil size while they slept. did. Over time, the researchers taught the mice other tasks and tracked their brain activity and pupil size when they went back to sleep.
The researchers interrupted the mice’s sleep when the diameter of their pupils became smaller or larger, and tested the mice’s ability to complete new and old tasks. This allowed the researchers to determine which pupil sizes were associated with new memories and repetition of old ones.
The results showed that mice reactivated new memories during the lower stages of NREM sleep, when the pupil diameter is small, and reactivated old memories during the lower stages of NREM sleep, when the pupil diameters are large.
Although additional work is still needed to fully dissect this process, this study provides important insights into the storage of old and new memories and opens new possibilities for memory research. It may help in future memory technologies and treatments for humans.
read more: How napping improves memory performance
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Sam Walters is a journalist who covers a variety of topics including archaeology, paleontology, ecology and evolution for Discover. Before joining the Discover team as associate editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
