Old age memory loss may be caused by age-related SLEEP issues: Focusing on shut-eye could be the key to fighting brain decay, study claims
- When older people don't get a good night's sleep, memory consolidation gets interrupted
- Long-term memories are formed during deep REM sleep, when two kinds of sleep waves should be working in sync
- Older brains struggle to keep time between the two waves
- University of California, Berkeley sleep scientists that stimulating the brain could restore sleep and memory
Poor sleep causes memory to fail in older people, and improving the quality of sleep could restore recall as well, a new study suggests.
Sleep plays an important role in the consolidation of memories, moving information from temporary to permanent storage areas of the brain.
When older people are unable to get a good night's rest, memory consolidation gets interrupted.
Long-term memories are formed when the brain produces two kinds of electrical waves to create deep REM sleep, but aging brains struggle to keep the two kinds of waves in sync.
New research from the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrated a link between the ability to recall information, and the quality of nightly sleep, suggesting that if sleep could be improved, the effects of dementia might be reduced too.
Older brains struggle to keep two brain waves in sync during sleep, and when this coordination is lost, both sleep and memory suffer, according to the new UC Berkeley study
More than 5.5 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer's, and those numbers are only expected to climb as the population ages.
While much about sleep's purpose in our survival remains a mystery, we do know that it helps us to solidify memories.
During our waking hours, the hippocampus forms short memories out of the sensory information we take in.
That information is stored as electrical signals, which get replayed during sleep. What information is in each recording determines where in the brain's outer cortex - which acts like a long-term bookshelf - memories get stored more permanently.
Deep sleep is produced by a pair of coordinating waves of electrical activity. In the new study, published in Neuron, the researchers monitored these waves during the sleep of young and older people.
Before the study participants slept, the Berkeley scientists taught them each 120 pairs of words.
The younger group's waves were, in general, in better sync, while the older participants' brains struggled to keep time, leading to poorer recall in the morning.
As the brain ages, it begins to atrophy, or shrink as cells start to die. This is a natural part of aging, but the researchers believe that these cell deaths may be causing the lost synchronization and rhythms in older people's brains.
With age, 'the brain degrades, some parts even quickly than others, and those are the same regions that help generate and maintain sleep,' study co-author Dr Matthew Walker told Daily Mail Online in a recent interview.
'It's the sad tragedy in aging,' he says. But he thinks all may not be lost.
'We're working toward using electrical brain stimulation to see if we can give back healthy sleep by restoring those big, beautiful, powerful deep brain waves.'
If he and his team can successfully zap brain waves back into rhythm, they might be able to restore the memory-forming abilities of older adults as well.
Sleeping only three hours a night doesn't make Donald Trump better than you: It's genetic, study suggests
- National Institutes of Health researchers bred fruit flies to sleep more or less
- The CDC recommends everyone get seven hours of sleep a night
- Some successful people claim that they need far less
- By breeding many generations, researchers identified 126 variations of genes that determined whether a fruit fly needed three or 10 hours of sleep a night
- The genetic lines bred to sleep less had worse survival rates and were 'less fit'
Genetics may determine whether you can run on three hours of sleep a night, as Donald Trump famously claims to do, or if you're useless with less than eight, a new study suggests.
We don't know exactly why we need sleep, but we do know that every animal needs some amount of sleep.
Everyone is supposed to get at least seven hours of sleep a night, according to the CDC, but that just doesn't seem to be possible for the 40 percent of Americans who are reportedly under-slept.
National Institutes of Health researchers found that the difference between long-sleepers and short sleepers may be simply genetic, according to their study of flies.
Donald Trump (left) and Rihanna (right) claim to sleep only three and four hours a night, respectively. New research suggests their short nights may be genetic
Guidelines on sleep are one-size-fits-all, but some successful people love to draw attention to their ability to not only survive but thrive on little sleep.
Rihanna claims she just can't sleep more than about four hours a night, binge watching TV instead. Donald Trump and Tom Ford both say that somewhere in the neighborhood of three hours suffice for them.
But new evidence suggests that their sleeplessness are not necessarily a sign of exception genius or drive, but genetics.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers compared the sleep cycles of 13 generations of fruit flies.
They selectively bred each generation's sleep patterns to be more and more polarized.
Fruit flies are surprisingly genetically similar, and by the end of the selection process, their sleep needs were too, varying from 3.3 hours to 10 hours.
As they bred the flies into Sleeping Beauty and Energizer Bunny extremes, the researchers were able to identify 126 different variations in 80 genes.
That's a lot of variation and complexity for one behavior, which, the authors write 'suggests that sleep duration in natural populations can be influenced by a wide variety of biological processes, which may be why the purpose of sleep has been so elusive.'
But that does not mean that all sleep is equal.
'Very short sleep duration might be difficult to maintain in nature, except when strong selection pressure is present,' the authors wrote.
The later generations of the short-sleeping flies tended to peter out earlier, indicating that short sleepers like Donald Trump and his children 'may be less fit,' evolutionarily, the study authors wrote.
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