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tonyPick [soylentnews.org] writes:

Aeon has an article on research about the retrieval of memories [aeon.co], and the ways in which some discoveries can be used to affect behaviour and improve learning.

At Northwestern University in Illinois, Ken Paller and colleagues have found that slow-wave sleep – more commonly known as deep sleep – can cause memory reactivation because of its periods of heightened neural synchrony, when lots of neurons activate together.

Of particular interest for language-learning, Paller’s lab has found that memory reactivation during slow-wave sleep can be manipulated to improve specific memories. For example, they found that if you pair a sound with a picture while awake, and then play the sound during slow-wave sleep, this improves later recall of that picture – although the effect depends on how well you had learned the pairing the first time.

The article focuses on the potential implications of this research on learning languages, and is also published on the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) blog [cogneurosociety.org], and there is additional background on the original presentation [cogneurosociety.org] behind the article.

...a session chaired by Lila Davachi (NYU) at the CNS annual meeting in New York, is elucidating how memory reactivation contributes to memory persistence and integration into our everyday lives. Shohamy of Columbia University focused on how that process affects decision-making, while Ken Paller of Northwestern University, talked about the influence of sleep.

Original Submission