Scientists have found that carefully timed sounds that rise and fall at the same rate as brain activity during deep sleep can improve memory...
“Importantly, the sound stimulation is effective only when the sounds occur in synchrony with the ongoing slow oscillation rhythm during deep sleep,” said Dr Jan Born, who led the research at the University of Tubingen, in Germany…
When they were played the sound out of synchronisation with their brain waves, the volunteers experienced no improvements in memory the next day.
Dr. Carmen Westerberg, whom I aided in the sleep lab last year, did her post-doc at Northwestern university, and did many similar studies as Jan Born. They did an extremely interesting one, and a bit groundbreaking, having people move tiles with pictures to particular locations. Those tiles made sounds relevant to the pictures. The cat would meow, etc.
Replaying the sounds of half of those tiles during slow wave sleep significantly increased people’s ability to recall where those tiles were placed. And Scent works to aid memory consolidation in SWS as well, as Born has demonstrated. This researcher at Northwestern is named Ken Paller.
I don’t think the study can be obtained without access to the journal.
I was going to run a very similar study with declarative memories (nonsense “facts” such as “George Washington owned a golden retriever” to prevent any previous knowledge for interfering) with her in early 2013. The subjects were to be trained in the method of loci, and the idea was to shed light on a few things (there were to be multiple controls) but most notably that the intervention could be used for something more “useful” than the position of tiles, (facts) and also would include controls for determining if the spatial aspect of fabricated spatial associations would be strengthened by these same interventions even though the sensory aspect was imaginary and not actual, as well as having controls (8 groups total) that would fill their apartments with plugin scents of the same scent that they would be exposed to during SWS in the lab. (The palaces were to be built in each person’s home). It would have required 80 subjects, and ensuring that there was adequate understanding of the method of loci would have to be done by me on a personal basis, as well as the testing and analysis. Though grateful for the opportunity, the reason that I did not actually carry this out is that the time that would take on top of my studies would preclude me from training for the 2013 USAMC seriously. And then, I graduated. If I don’t pursue this in the future, which is unlikely due to the limited number of programs where that is possible, and the limited number of researchers within the vein that would even consider that interesting of worthy of their valuable time, probably nobody will carry out these experiments at any point in the future. Sorry about that. (Should I be ashamed? I don’t know )
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