Speed Racer ain't Got Nothing on This!

Can we really recall things that we learned prior to going to bed in our sleep? I mean I can definitely say I’ve had some nights were I’m like half sleep I guess and I am either literally going through all the material I learned in my head or for some reason my mind goes to this weird place and it turns into some stress dream and I’ve failed out of college. But there is definitely truth to this to experience recall.

In the article by Wamsley the experimenters are focusing on “Recant experience recall”, in order to test recall, they use an interactive video games called Alpine Racer to explore what happens in memory traces while participants sleep. Doing this asks the question how specific features of the memory reactivation can change, and how recall can affect performance. In prior studies they have noticed that this form of memory recall is most commonly seen in NREM sleep almost immediately after sleep onset so the experimenters decided to collect mentation samples from the NREM sleep.

There were 16 college age males that took place in the study who played Alpine Racer for 3 consecutive days, then later for a single day. The experimenters also brought in another group for a 3^rd experiment who played three sessions of Alpine Racer and were monitored using PSG and Nightcap recording.

Concluding the experiment, they found that recent experiences are recalled in the brain while we sleep and can have a strong influence in our sleep onset mentation but found that over a period of time post-training the amount of Alpine related content decreased. And that our dreams and thoughts after learning or practicing new information becomes completely dominant of what we recently learned.

This is super neat that we somehow continue to process and in a way practice new information while we sleep, I wish all learning happened when we slept I would have like zero sleep debt. 









I commented on Matt's blog