About This Project

Sleep is beneficial for memory formation. Consequently, those with poor sleep quality (e.g., older adults) also have increased forgetfulness. We plan to see whether improving sleep quality using a known mechanism -- mild skin warming -- will improve memory formation in adults. Enhancing sleep by natural means can enhance memory formation, and, in effect, can impact the lives of countless older adults who suffer from memory deficits.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Information learned while awake is transferred from short-term to long-term memory during sleep. The Slow Wave Sleep (SWS) stage is particularly important for memory formation, as it initiates brain synchronicity that enhances plasticity and information transfer.

Unfortunately, with aging comes a characteristic shortening of SWS. It is therefore assumed that age-related changes in sleep contribute to age-related memory deficits.

Early sleep studies consistently found that a simple mechanism -- skin warming -- can induce longer sleep and greater amounts of SWS in both younger and older adults. In fact, skin must only be warmed by about .5 degrees F to have beneficial effects on sleep. If sleep is improved using this mechanism, memory formation should be improve as well.

What is the significance of this project?

There are very few ways to behaviorally improve sleep quality. Age-related sleep deficits are often the product of physiological changes, and therefore most sleep enhancers are pharmacological (e.g., sleeping pills). Unfortunately, these sleep enhancers do not provide a "natural" night of sleep, meaning sleep stage proportions are not ideal for the overnight formation of memories.

It follows, then, that a non-pharmacological sleep enhancer is needed. The proposed project utilizes a harmless and simple mechanism to improve sleep, and we feel it is a promising option for relieving older adults of sleep burdens and consequential deficits in sleep-dependent memory formation.

What are the goals of the project?

Our goal is to create an experiment where memory formation is compared after a deepened night of sleep (via mild skin warming) to a night without warmed skin.We hypothesize that enhanced sleep will induce enhanced memory formation. __________________________________________

Here is some great literature on this topic:

Sleep studies: Raymann, et al., 2005; Raymann, et al., 2007; Raymann, et al., 2008; Fronczek et al., 2008a, Fronczek et al., 2008b

Non-sleep studies: Minson et al., 2002; Shibaski et al., 2002; Kanosue et al., 2002; Pierzga et al., 2003; Jackson et al., 2003; Kamijo et al., 2003; Low et al., 2007; Kenny & Jay, 2007; Hodges et al., 2009