• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Tracking Health and Wellness Applications of Brain Science

Spanish
sb-logo-with-brain
  • Resources
    • Monthly eNewsletter
    • Solving the Brain Fitness Puzzle
    • The SharpBrains Guide to Brain Fitness
    • How to evaluate brain training claims
    • Resources at a Glance
  • Brain Teasers
    • Top 25 Brain Teasers & Games for Teens and Adults
    • Brain Teasers for each Cognitive Ability
    • More Mind Teasers & Games for Adults of any Age
  • Virtual Summits
    • 2019 SharpBrains Virtual Summit
    • Speaker Roster
    • Brainnovations Pitch Contest
    • 2017 SharpBrains Virtual Summit
    • 2016 SharpBrains Virtual Summit
    • 2015 SharpBrains Virtual Summit
    • 2014 SharpBrains Virtual Summit
  • Report: Pervasive Neurotechnology
  • Report: Digital Brain Health
  • About
    • Mission & Team
    • Endorsements
    • Public Speaking
    • In the News
    • Contact Us

Sleep, Tetris, Memory and the Brain

March 24, 2008 by Alvaro Fernandez

As part of our ongo­ing Author Speaks Series, we are hon­ored to present today this excel­lent arti­cle by Dr. Shan­non Mof­fett, based on her illu­mi­nat­ing and engag­ing book. Enjoy!

(and please go to sleep soon if you are read­ing this late Mon­day night).
————

Two years ago I fin­ished a book on the mind/brain, called The Three Pound Enig­ma: The Human Brain and the Quest to Unlock its Mys­ter­iesShannon Moffett-Three Pound Enigma . Each chap­ter pro­files a leader in a dif­fer­ent aspect of mind/brain research, from neu­ro­surgery to zen Bud­dhism, from cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science to phi­los­o­phy of mind. One of my sub­jects was Dr. Robert Stick­gold, a zany, hyper-intel­li­gent men­sch of a Har­vard sleep researcher. When I met him, I was in med­ical school and hav­ing a grand old time—I’d exact­ed an exten­sion of my tenure beyond the cus­tom­ary four years, so I had enough time to write the book, do my course­work, and have a life. I was busy, but still got enough sleep, had time to exer­cise dai­ly, and even went for din­ner and a movie some­times. Although I found Stickgold’s work inter­est­ing, there was a part of me that just didn’t get it.

Fast-for­ward to the present, when I am a res­i­dent in emer­gency med­i­cine at a busy inner-city trau­ma cen­ter; I have two-year-old twins and a hus­band with a 60-hour-a-week job of his own. I do not exer­cise. I do not eat unless I can do some­thing else pro­duc­tive at the same time, and even when I do get to sleep in my own bed, my slum­ber is frac­tured by the awak­en­ings of two cir­ca­di­an­ly dis­parate tod­dlers. It seems to take me twice as long to “get” new con­cepts as it used to, and I nev­er feel like I’m func­tion­ing at top speed. In short, I am a mess. And NOW I get what Stickgold’s work is all about, and under­stand that he is both quan­ti­fy­ing and explain­ing exact­ly what I’m feeling.

Sleep is so obvi­ous a phys­i­o­log­ic need (from insects to mam­mals, all ani­mals sleep) that it doesn’t even occur to most of us to won­der why we have to do it—why in the world would we need to lie down, par­a­lyzed, for a third of our lives, with our brains in some sort of auto-pilot chaos? What do we get out of the process? It is aston­ish­ing how sparse is science’s answer to that ques­tion, but Stick­gold and oth­ers are begin­ning to pro­vide a solu­tion, and their answer ought to make any of us who are inter­est­ed in men­tal fit­ness sit up (or rather, lie down) and take notice.

When I met him, Stick­gold was just hit­ting his stride in what would turn out to be his spe­cial­ized area of research—the con­nec­tion between sleep and cog­ni­tion, and in par­tic­u­lar, between sleep and mem­o­ry. I had become inter­est­ed in his work part­ly because he was using non-tra­di­tion­al research tools: while many neu­ro­science exper­i­ments involve set­ting their sub­jects tedious made-up tasks, Stick­gold had heed­ed the sug­ges­tion of one of his under­grad­u­ate research assis­tants and was using video-games as his men­tal challenges.

Using the com­put­er-game Tetris he’d found what many of us knew anec­do­tal­ly: that just as they fall asleep after long Tetris prac­tice ses­sions, play­ers hal­lu­ci­nate images of the pecu­liar­ly-shaped Tetris tiles drift­ing down their fields of vision. It turns out, Stick­gold found, that even sub­jects with severe amne­sia, who couldn’t recall hav­ing played the game at all, had the same expe­ri­ence. He hypoth­e­sized that those images must have some­thing to do with a par­tic­u­lar kind of skill mem­o­ry, known as pro­ce­dur­al memory— the type of phys­i­cal mem­o­ry cre­at­ed when you prac­tice the vio­lin, or learn to play ten­nis, or write cal­lig­ra­phy. This type of mem­o­ry is often pre­served even in peo­ple with severe amne­sia. It seems like­ly that sleep is serv­ing to some­how orga­nize this type of mem­o­ry. And it turns out that with­out any fur­ther prac­tice, the sub­jects showed improve­ment in their Tetris scores after they’d “slept on” their new­found skill.

In a more tra­di­tion­al exper­i­ment, Stick­gold has shown that after a snooze, peo­ple per­formed much bet­ter on a recent­ly-learned fin­ger-tap­ping task than after the same amount of time with­out sleep. Even dou­bling the amount of time spent learn­ing the task had an insignif­i­cant per­for­mance ben­e­fit com­pared to sim­ply get­ting a night’s sleep between ses­sions. He lat­er showed that you don’t even need a whole night’s sleep but that an hour’s nap can give you the same learn­ing ben­e­fits (thank Heav­ens, I say, from my new van­tage-point as a sleep-scavenger).

Stick­gold also showed that sub­jects who weren’t allowed to sleep soon after learn­ing a new skill nev­er regained the lost ben­e­fit, and—unless giv­en more practice/sleep cycles—never got quite as good at the skill as those who’d been allowed to sleep soon after their train­ing sessions.

More recent­ly, Stickgold’s lab has shown that sleep makes a stun­ning dif­fer­ence in the abil­i­ty of a par­tic­u­lar kind of mem­o­ry known as “declarative” mem­o­ry to with­stand inter­fer­ence. Declar­a­tive mem­o­ry has to do with facts: what you ate for break­fast today, where you last put your keys, what you read in this morning’s paper—all of these are declar­a­tive mem­o­ries. In an ele­gant exper­i­ment, Stick­gold taught a group of peo­ple a list of word-pairs. Then one half the group was sent off to bed, while the oth­er half was asked to remain awake.

At the end of the wait­ing peri­od, half the sleep­ers and half the awake sub­jects were taught anoth­er set of “interference” words, pairs designed to con­fuse the mem­o­ry of the orig­i­nal pair­ings. Imme­di­ate­ly after­ward, all sub­jects were test­ed on the ini­tial word-pairs. The group that had received the inter­fer­ence teach­ing but slept before­hand aver­aged about 76% on the test. The group that received the inter­fer­ence train­ing but had remained awake between the two ses­sions aver­aged about 32%.

Appar­ent­ly, just sleep­ing on the new infor­ma­tion had some­how cement­ed it into subjects’ minds so that it was resis­tant to inter­fer­ence. To those of us who are des­per­ate to retain—accurately—the new infor­ma­tion with which we are bom­bard­ed each day, such research is eye-open­ing, and poten­tial­ly life-changing.

Stick­gold is not the only sci­en­tist study­ing human sleep, of course—there are oth­ers work­ing on sleep and cog­ni­tion (most with results sim­i­lar to Stickgold’s), and more researchers pro­vid­ing con­vinc­ing evi­dence that sleep boosts your immune sys­tem, improves your mood, and—oh yeah—helps you stay awake when you want to be. There is also evi­dence that get­ting poor or insuf­fi­cient sleep rais­es your risk of obe­si­ty, heart dis­ease and dia­betes; increas­es your blood pres­sure; and makes you acci­dent-prone: all great rea­sons to get a good night’s sleep (which, accord­ing to sci­en­tists, is 8–9 hours of unin­ter­rupt­ed slum­ber). Yet, like many Amer­i­cans, I am more moti­vat­ed by the stud­ies show­ing sleep’s cog­ni­tive ben­e­fits. I had been going to go hit the books when I fin­ished this piece—now I think I’ll just hit the hay. Maybe you should, too.

Shannon Moffett-Three Pound Enigma– Shan­non Mof­fet has an MD from Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty School of Med­i­cine, and is in her res­i­den­cy in emer­gency med­i­cine at High­land Hos­pi­tal in Oak­land, CA. Her book on the brain (and eight dynam­ic brain-mavens, includ­ing Robert Stick­gold) is The Three Pound Enig­ma: The Human Brain and the Quest to Unlock its Mys­ter­ies. Mof­fett recent­ly appeared on The Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram, which aired nation­wide on PBS.

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Email
  • Print
  • More
  • Share on Tumblr
  • Pock­et

Filed Under: Brain/ Mental Health Tagged With: brain, brain-fitness-program, brain-fitness-program-pbs, emergency-medicine-zen-Buddhism, Learning, memory, mental-challenges, mind/brain-research, neurosurgery, PBS, Robert-Stickgold, Shannon-Moffett, sleep, sleep-and-brain, sleep-and-memory, sleep-researcher, Tetris, Three-Pound-Enigma, video-games

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Rob at Kintropy says

    April 3, 2008 at 3:25

    Thanks for all the info. My wife loves Tetris, so I’m sure she’ll be hap­py to replay Dr. Stick­gold’s experiments.

    I am, unfor­tu­nate­ly, writ­ing at 3:20am, wait­ing for my 4‑year-old daugh­ter to wake also (we are blessed with kids on my lack-of-sleep clock ;-).

  2. Alvaro says

    April 6, 2008 at 7:35

    Rob, as dad of a 3‑week old daugh­ter, I hear you…

  3. carl nyiri says

    April 30, 2008 at 9:42

    Hi Shan­non,

    Great job on this site!
    Get some sleep.

    Carl L. Nyiri
    Self pro­claimed mind brain junkey.

  4. Gary D says

    October 22, 2008 at 10:54

    Excel­lent arti­cle on impor­tance of sleep/recovery. So impor­tant, yet so elu­sive.. for me at least. Thanks for post­ing this reminder.

Primary Sidebar

Top Articles on Brain Health and Neuroplasticity

  1. Can you grow your hippocampus? Yes. Here’s how, and why it matters
  2. How learning changes your brain
  3. To harness neuroplasticity, start with enthusiasm
  4. Three ways to protect your mental health during –and after– COVID-19
  5. Why you turn down the radio when you're lost
  6. Solving the Brain Fitness Puzzle Is the Key to Self-Empowered Aging
  7. Ten neu­rotech­nolo­gies about to trans­form brain enhance­ment & health
  8. Five reasons the future of brain enhancement is digital, pervasive and (hopefully) bright
  9. What Educators and Parents Should Know About Neuroplasticity and Dance
  10. The Ten Habits of Highly Effective Brains
  11. Six tips to build resilience and prevent brain-damaging stress
  12. Can brain training work? Yes, if it meets these 5 conditions
  13. What are cognitive abilities and how to boost them?
  14. Eight Tips To Remember What You Read
  15. Twenty Must-Know Facts to Harness Neuroplasticity and Improve Brain Health

Top 10 Brain Teasers and Illusions

  1. You think you know the colors? Try the Stroop Test
  2. Check out this brief attention experiment
  3. Test your stress level
  4. Guess: Are there more brain connections or leaves in the Amazon?
  5. Quick brain teasers to flex two key men­tal mus­cles
  6. Count the Fs in this sentence
  7. Can you iden­tify Apple’s logo?
  8. Ten classic optical illu­sions to trick your mind
  9. What do you see?
  10. Fun Mental Rotation challenge
  • Check our Top 25 Brain Teasers, Games and Illusions

Join 12,560 readers exploring, at no cost, the latest in neuroplasticity and brain health.

By subscribing you agree to receive our free, monthly eNewsletter. We don't rent or sell emails collected, and you may unsubscribe at any time.

IMPORTANT: Please check your inbox or spam folder in a couple minutes and confirm your subscription.

Get In Touch!

Contact Us

660 4th Street, Suite 205,
San Francisco, CA 94107 USA

About Us

SharpBrains is an independent market research firm tracking health and performance applications of brain science. We prepare general and tailored market reports, publish consumer guides, produce an annual global and virtual conference, and provide strategic advisory services.

© 2023 SharpBrains. All Rights Reserved - Privacy Policy