. How Sleep Affects Your Memory. Listen. So how much rest does your brain really need, and what does it do with that rest once it. do you want to take a crack at that? is that your sense of REM as.
How long does cocaine stay in the body? If you’re asking how long does cocaine stay in your system when. if you’ve been eating your protein because protein affects creatine which is converted into creatinine. Here's a look at some of the ways cocaine affects the body and brain. This is what cocaine does to your body and brain. You may feel more energised or alert. Smoking crack cocaine has been linked with numerous lung. Healing Spirit Mind Body Dr. Dalal Akoury (843-213-1480) Wellness Video Gallery by AWAREmed; AWAREmed Health and Wellness Resource Center activities; Testimonials. Is Alcohol Causing Your Cancer?
Insane Ways Music Affects The Body (According to Science)At this point, you may be asking, "Sure, music can fix my brain, but can it fix my body?" which would indicate you expect entirely too much from i. Tunes. No amount of power ballads is going to cure your heartburn or trim a few pounds off anyone's overly- gelatinous ass.
However, if you have Parkinson's disease, it just might be able to help. Victims of Parkinson's suffer from muscle spasms, locking muscles, balance problems and sketchy scientists with kick ass time machines. As it turns out, applying music can instantly resolve the physical issues of Parkinson's in many victims. Take Rande Gedaliah, who was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2. The disease eventually led to a serious fall in the shower.
Things were looking pretty grim until one day she found out she could listen to music and suddenly be able to move with ease, the type of music determining the speed she walks at. We Are the Champions let her walk a slow clip and Born in the USA made her move faster still.
Anything by Nickelback sent her spiraling into a rage. Ancient warriors listened to their Nickelback equivalent, thrashing and scraping bones on rocks,to produce a similar effect before combat. How Does it Work? When you're locked in your room, listening to your old N'Sync CDs, have you ever noticed your foot tapping on its own? That's not just because you have terrible taste in music. It's because the portions of the brain which deal with rhythm and movement are so automated that it requires no conscious attention to move to a beat.
It's like your brain going behind your back to get things done because it knows it can't rely on you to bust an appropriate move when you hear "Bye Bye Bye."This movement isn't handled by the same process as walking up the stairs or hilariously farting with your armpit. Suddenly, patients with bradykinesia- -an inability to initiate movement- -can move instantly as their brain interprets the music and sends movement signals to their legs, essentially tricking their bodies into moving. We'll say that again for you: Music can trick your broken, unresponsive body into obedience. Think about it: How many times have you thrown your hands in the air?
When that happened, did you just not care? Science says that's because you had no control. Music also helps other Parkinson's- related issues, including loss of balance and spasms. It's also been found that playing music creates an improvement in people with the disease, and drum circles are being used as treatment in music therapy groups, presumably because drums are cheaper than fancy- ass medical equipment, anyway. When hippies become doctors.
7 Insane Ways Music Affects The Body (According to Science) Facebook; Twitter. Dopamine is your brain's natural crack. check out 6 Things Your Body Does Every Day That Science Can't Explain.
Do you have something funny to say about a random topic? You could be on the front page of Cracked.
Go here and find out how to create a Topic Page. For more things science is scratching its head about, check out 6 Things Your Body Does Every Day That Science Can't Explain. Or find out why you should punch your body right now, in Your Body Hates You: 6 Gruesome Disorders Anyone Can Get. And stop by our Top Picks (Updated 2.
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How Sleep Affects Your Memory : NPRJOE PALCA, HOST: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Joe Palca, sitting in for Ira Flatow. If you add it up, we spend a lot of time sleeping, about a third of our lives, actually, and it turns out our bodies don't just power down as we slumber. Research is showing that sleep plays an important role in how our brains process and store the information that we learn throughout the day.
A study published in last week's edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience looked at how sleep patterns change as we age and how those changes affect our memories. The researchers found that as we got older, as we get older, the quality of our sleep deteriorates, and so does our ability to remember newly learned information. So how much rest does your brain really need, and what does it do with that rest once it's getting it? We're talking about the science of sleep this hour.
We want to hear from you. Maybe you have some theories about what the brain is doing while you're asleep. We'd like to hear about that. Give us a call. It's - the number is 1- 8. TALK. And if you're on Twitter, you can tweet us your questions by writing the @ sign followed by scifri. If you want more information about what we will be talking about this hour, go to our website, www. And now let me introduce my guests.
First we have Matthew Walker, he's an associate professor and principal investigator of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at University of California, Berkeley. He's co- author of the study published last week in Nature Neuroscience, I guess it was actually a review article. He joins me from a studio in Berkeley, California.
Welcome to the program. MATTHEW WALKER: Thank you very much for having me. PALCA: Also we have Robert Stickgold is associate professor of psychiatry and director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. He joins me by phone today. Welcome. ROBERT STICKGOLD: Hi Joe. PALCA: And you're still able to see - you're still aboveground there, the snow hasn't come to the roof of your house?
STICKGOLD: I can see all the way out to the street. PALCA: OK, well that's good. Well have an update at the end of the hour.
Next is Ken Paller, he's a professor of brain, behavior and cognition in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University. He joins me from a studio in Evanston, Illinois. Welcome to the program. KEN PALLER: Thank you, Joe. PALCA: And we also have Michael Silber, he's a professor neurology and co- director of The Center for Sleep Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He's also pas president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Welcome to you. MICHAEL SILBER: Thank you, pleasure to be here.
PALCA: So we have a lot of people and a lot of things to talk about, but let's start with you, Matthew Walker. Tell us a little bit about what this review article was looking at. What is happening with sleep - I mean memory and aging and its relationship to sleep? I guess that's kind of a big question, but you can give us a short answer. WALKER: It's a fine question, we've got an hour. There's actually two articles. One was a review article that myself and Robert Stickgold wrote, and the other was a scientific publication regarding aging.
So regarding the aging, it's interesting, I think all of us know as we get older that our memory starts to deteriorate and is not as precise as it used to be. But perhaps what people don't also understand is that one of the quintessential, physiological hallmarks of getting older is that our sleep starts to deteriorate. And that deterioration actually starts to happen quite early on. We can see it in the electrical brainwaves. And what we found in this new paper was that those two things aren't actually independent.
It's not that we simply get old, and memory starts to go, and sleep starts to deteriorate. But those two things actually are significantly interrelated. And perhaps one of the contributing factors to our poor memory as we get older is the deterioration of sleep, knowing now what we know about the importance of sleep for learning and memory. PALCA: So maybe I can turn to you, Robert Stickgold. You've done a lot of research on sleep and memory. How does that work, that you can actually tell which stage of sleep is most critical for consolidation of memories? STICKGOLD: Well, it turns out that probably all the stages of sleep are involved, but they're involved in different ways.
And so what we will classically do is we'll train subjects on some memory task, and it might be a list of words, or it might be a typing sequence. So it can be very different types of memory problems. And we'll train some subjects in the morning and test them 1.
And we'll compare how those two groups do. And what we see pretty consistently is that the ones who got a chance to sleep will actually be performing much better after that 1. And then what we do is we go, and we look, and we say OK, well, what about their sleep seems to predict the improvement?
So on one task it might be the amount of deep sleep you get early in the night, and this would be the case more for things like verbal memory, that you'll see that the amount of improvement subjects show after sleep will depend on how much of that slow wave, that deep sleep they get, whereas in other tasks it might correlate with the amount of REM sleep that they get. PALCA: I see, so it's time- dependent and stage- dependent, depending - and I should say that people maybe don't know that sleep has many stages. There's REM sleep, where your eyes are flopping around and other things happen, and then there's what they call non- REM sleep, which they break down into several categories of slow- wave and fast- wave. So.. STICKGOLD: Yes, so in a given night, you go through a 9. You go into very deep sleep, and then your sleep lightens up, and you come into REM or rapid- eye- movement sleep, which is notorious for its intense dreaming. And then you, in the next 9. REM. And you do that all night long.
You get about five of those cycles in a night. PALCA: I have to say that we are having this discussion on the 6. Eugene Aserinsky Nathaniel Kleitman describing REM sleep in Science magazine. I printed it out just so I'd have something iconic here while I was doing the show. STICKGOLD: Yes. PALCA: So Ken Paller, given that, is there anything in your research that shows that there's something about improving sleep that would help us with memory during the night?
PALLER: Sure, one of the dimensions that Bob almost mentioned is that there are different types of memory. So we want to be clear that these different types of memory depend on different brain mechanisms, and then in turn different aspects of sleep may be important for the different types of memory. As Bob mentioned, slow- wave sleep is one of the most interesting types of sleep to connect to a class of memory we call declarative memory, which is recalling and recognizing facts and events that have happened to you. And so by improving slow- wave sleep, it might be possible to improve that type of memory. PALCA: So what do you think? Is there going to be a pill someday that you can take before you go to bed or in the morning when you wake up that's going to improve not just your ability to sleep but the kind of sleep you get? PALLER: I don't know if there'll be pills that'll have the right specificity.
Right now the methods that are being used are to try to stimulate the brain during sleep, to try to see exactly what the connection is between these different stages and the memory effects that you can measure both by looking at the physiology of the brain at the time and also measuring memory after people wake up. WALKER: And something to remember is that a type of sleep that might be good for one type of memory might not be good for another. So as you try to tweak your sleep one way or the other, you might be, you might be doing great - you might do better at remembering details of an event, but you might end up being poorer at abstracting the gist or the rules associated with it.
Those might be more useful interventions, though, in clinical populations who have deficits. So for example there's a type of neurophysiological event that we see in the EEG, what's called a sleep spindle, and patients with schizophrenia have about a 5. So it might be that medications that can increase that would be of general value by getting them back into a normal range. STICKGOLD: And just, too - sorry, I was just going to mention, just to deepen the plot, we also of course understand that sleep is not just only serving one particular function such as learning and memory.
It serves a whole constellation of biological functions, both for the brain and also for the body. And so I think to think about how to exclusively brute- force perhaps one type of sleep because we think it's important for one type of memory, we probably do the evolutionary process a disservice thinking that it doesn't already know how to homeostatically tweak exactly what type of sleep it needs each and every night. PALCA: Homeostatically tweaking is something I always like to take some time out to do each day.(LAUGHTER)STICKGOLD: Yeah, I make a point myself, religiously. PALCA: Exactly. Michael Silber, I haven't forgotten about you because - but I wanted to hold you because I think you're going to be very valuable in helping to answer some of our callers' questions. And so I'm going to go take a call now from William(ph) in Hayley, Idaho. William, welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
What's your question? WILLIAM: Thanks for having me on the show. I've been diagnosed as ADHD, and I guess I've been pretty bad ADHD my whole life. But I've always - most of my whole life, even my mother reminds, even when I was a child, I, you know, four hours of sleep is about what I get at night.
And it's - I wake up fully rested, and it just sleep's not a real important issue for me.