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Retronasal Olfaction
Published in Alan R. Hirsch, Nutrition and Sensation, 2023
Jason J. Gruss, Alan R. Hirsch
In addition to the direct link to the primary olfactory cortex, the olfactory nerve is also linked to the amygdala. This direct connection is significant as the amygdala controls the formation and storage of memories associated with emotional events. The amygdala is also involved in memory consolidation, which plays critical roles in long-term memory formation. It has been well established that damage to this structure produces significant social and emotional deficits (Brown and Shafer 1888; Kluver and Bucy 1939).
Why do we dream?
Published in Josie Malinowski, The Psychology of Dreaming, 2020
There’s no doubt that memory consolidation (the process by which new memories become long-term memories) is a function of sleep. We need sleep before we make new memories, to get our brains in a state of readiness to receive this information; and we also need sleep after those new memories have been made, to help them become strengthened, solidified, and possible to be recalled at a later date. Sleep research is unequivocal on this. There’s even a theory that lack of sleep may be instrumental in bringing about the memory deficits seen in older-age diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s. It’s thought that, during sleep – especially non-REM sleep – our memories are reactivated, or replayed, and this strengthens them for future recall.
Sleep Promoting Improvement of Declarative Memory
Published in Bahman Zohuri, Patrick J. McDaniel, Electrical Brain Stimulation for the Treatment of Neurological Disorders, 2019
Bahman Zohuri, Patrick J. McDaniel
Together, these experiments present evidence that sleep provides special conditions enhancing declarative memory consolidation, which in turn allow memory traces to be actively reprocessed and strengthened during sleep. This reprocessing might also include a transfer of information temporarily stored in the hippocampus to neocortical brain regions, and stabilization or enhancement of synaptic connections. However, a qualitative reprocessing of information during sleep might also occur when during this process newly acquired memories become integrated with long-term memories assumed to reside in neocortical networks.40 In a recent study, Wagner et al.25 had subjects do a simple task that had one obvious (and long) and one hidden (and much shorter) solution. Thus, subjects finding the hidden solution could greatly shorten the time needed to complete the task. Subjects were confronted with the task for a short period in the evening before an interval of sleep or wakefulness. When subjects were confronted with the task again in the morning, those of them having slept were significantly better in finding the hidden rule than those who had not. They were also significantly better than were subjects who slept during the night but were not confronted with the task before, ruling out effects of fatigue and sleepiness. A possible interpretation of these data is that the representation of the task built before sleep is reprocessed during sleep and “restructured” in a way that allows the new solution to be found.
Oscillatory EEG Changes During Arithmetic Learning in Children
Published in Developmental Neuropsychology, 2019
Mojtaba Soltanlou, Christina Artemenko, Thomas Dresler, Andreas J. Fallgatter, Hans-Christoph Nuerk, Ann-Christine Ehlis
Investigating neurophysiological changes during arithmetic learning can, moreover, provide a better understanding of brain activation before memory consolidation. Memory consolidation refers to stabilizing memory after the initial acquisition (Sekeres, Moscovitch, & Winocur, 2017), which consists of two processes: synaptic and system consolidation. Synaptic consolidation occurs within the first few hours after learning or encoding new information; system consolidation is defined as moving memory traces from the hippocampus (hippocampus-dependent) to the neo-cortex (hippocampus-independent) over a period of weeks to years (Roediger, Dudai, & Fitzpatrick, 2007). While the majority of previous studies evaluating the training effects by pre-post comparison (e.g., Bloechle et al., 2016; Soltanlou et al., 2018) might have aimed at the investigation of synaptic or system consolidation, our results featuring EEG oscillatory changes during the course of multiplication learning might differ from changes reported in these studies.
The undead in culture and science
Published in Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings, 2018
Connie Nugent, Gilbert Berdine, Kenneth Nugent
Two neuroscientists have studied the behavior of zombies and developed a comprehensive but speculative model for alterations in the zombie brain that underlie their behavior.18 Zombies have an impulsive reactive aggression disorder caused by loss of orbitofrontal control of the amygdala. Ataxia is caused by disease in the cerebellum. Hippocampal damage causes problems with long-term memory consolidation. The language circuit is destroyed and explains the aphasia. Their reduced pain responses are secondary to damage in the somatosensory cortex. Degeneration in the posterior parietal cortices causes an attention locking disorder. Dysfunction in the ventral striatal reward pathways leads to addictive behaviors, such as flesh addiction. A zombie outbreak in Brooklyn in 2016 suggested that a single drug can cause this phenotype through diverse effects in the central nervous system (see below).
Targeted Memory Reactivation During Sleep, But Not Wake, Enhances Sensorimotor Skill Performance: A Pilot Study
Published in Journal of Motor Behavior, 2018
Brian P. Johnson, Steven M. Scharf, Kelly P. Westlake
Of the benefits of sleep, perhaps none has been more studied than learning and memory (for a review, see Diekelmann & Born, 2010). During sleep, spontaneous neural replay is thought to transfer memories from hippocampal-based short-term memory to cortically based long-term memory (Fischer, Nitschke, Melchert, Erdmann, & Born, 2005), enabling memories to become less prone to interference (Korman et al., 2007; Robertson, Press, & Pascaul-Leone, 2005). This process is known as memory consolidation. Compared with the wake state, sleep-based memory consolidation has been shown to result in greater stabilization (Hill, Tononi, & Ghilardi, 2009) and enhancement of sensorimotor performance (Al-Sharman & Siengsukon, 2013; Huber, Ghilardi, Massimini, & Tononi, 2004; Walker, Brakefield, Morgan, Hobson, & Stickgold, 2002). Moreover, evidence that memory consolidation is impaired following disruption or deprivation of sleep (Nemeth, Csabi, Janacsek, Varszegi, & Mari, 2012), emotional stress (Wang, Zhao, Ghitza, Li, & Lu, 2008), or learning a new task (Brashers-Krug, Shadmehr, & Bizzi, 1996), further supports the importance of sleep and lack of distractors during the memory consolidation phase of learning.