Nicanor M. Cacho Jr. Mr.

Elvin Gene Colcol

Brain Rhythm Predicts Ability to Sleep Through a

Noisy Night
ScienceDaily (Aug. 10, 2010) — Ever wonder why some people can sleep through just about anything, while
others get startled awake at each and every bump in the night?

People who have trouble sleeping in noisy environments often resort to strategies like earplugs or noise-
cancelling headphones that muffle the sound, but a new study from investigators at Massachusetts General
Hospital (MGH) may lead to ways to block disturbing sounds within the brain. In their report in the August 10
issue of Current Biology, the team reports finding a brain-wave pattern, reflecting activity of a key structure,
that predicts the ease at which sleep can be disrupted by noise.

"We wanted to investigate what the brain does to promote stable sleep, even in the face of noise, and why some
people are better at staying asleep than others," explains Jeffrey Ellenbogen, MD, chief of the MGH Division of
Sleep Medicine. "Understanding the tools and techniques the brain naturally uses could help us harness and
expand those responses to help stay asleep in noisy environments."

Upon entering the brain, most sensory information, including sound, passes through a deep-brain structure
called the thalamus on its way to the cortex where signals are perceived. Communication between these
structures continues during sleep and is reflected by fluctutions in the brain's electrical field, producing
rhythmic patterns detected through electroencephalography (EEG). Typical EEG patterns are used to
distinguish stages of sleep, and in the second and third stages, slow brain wave patterns are interspersed with
brief, rapid pulses called spindles.

Previous research suggested that brain activity producing spindles, which only appear during sleep, also keeps
sensory information from passing through the thalamus, a hypothesis the current study was designed to test. The
team enrolled 12 healthy, adult volunteers, each of whom spent three consecutive nights in the MGH sleep lab.
EEG reading were taken throughout each night, the first of which was quiet. During the next two nights,
participants were regularly subjected to increasing levels of noise until their EEGs indicated they were no
longer asleep.

A piece of advice for those who really must go to sleep with the radio or TV on: use a timer. The researchers'
evidence shows that such noises do disrupt sleep, whether the sleeping person realizes it or not.

Analyzing the results revealed that each participant maintained a consistent, night-to-night spindle rate and that
those with higher rates on the quiet night were less likely to be aroused on the noisy nights. Participants often
were not aware that their sleep had been interrupted, Ellenbogen notes, indicating that environmental noise can
have a greater impact on sleep quality than an individual may realize.

"We were surprised by the magnitude of the effect," he explains. "We designed the study to follow participants
for three nights to capture a lot of data, but the effect was so pronounced that we could see it after a single
'noisy' night. Now we want to study behavioral techniques, drugs or devices that may enhance sleep spindles
and see if they can help people stay asleep when confronted with noise and maintain otherwise healthy, natural
sleep."

An assistant professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, Ellenbogen hopes this work will be particularly
helpful to hospital patients, who are under stress and need quality sleep but are surrounded by often-noisy
equipment. "We need to work with hospitals around the country to develop solutions, targeting sounds like
alarms to the people who need to hear them and not those who don't. Brain-based solutions like enhancing sleep
spindles will likely have a role in these strategies."
Leovie Joy B. Candia Mr. Elvin Gene Colcol

People Learn New Information More Effectively

When Brain Activity Is Consistent, Research Shows
ScienceDaily (Sep. 9, 2010) — People are more likely to remember specific information such as faces or words
if the pattern of activity in their brain is similar each time they study that information, according to new research
from a University of Texas at Austin psychologist and his colleagues.

The findings by Russell Poldrack, published online September 10 in the journal Science, challenge
psychologists' long-held belief that people retain information more effectively when they study it several times
under different contexts and, thus, give their brains multiple cues to remember it.

"This helps us begin to understand what makes for effective studying," says Poldrack, director of the Imaging
Research Center (IRC) at The University of Texas at Austin. "Sometimes we study and remember things,
sometimes we don't and this helps explain why."

Until now, scientists have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology to examine activity
in large regions of the brain when studying memory. The research represents the first time scientists have
analyzed human memory by examining the pattern of activity across many different parts of the image called
voxels. The new technique allows them to probe more deeply into the relationship between the mind and the
brain.

Poldrack is a professor in the Section of Neurobiology and Department of Psychology. His co-authors include
Jeanette Mumford, a statistician at The University of Texas at Austin; Gui Xue of the University of Southern
California and Beijing Normal University; Qi Dong of Beijing Normal Uniersity; Zhong-Lin Lu of the
University of Southern California (USC); and Chuansheng Chen of the University of California, Irvine.

"The question is how practice makes perfect. If you precisely reactivate the same pattern each time, then you are
going to remember better," says Xue, a research assistant professor of psychology at USC.

The researchers conducted three studies at Beijing Normal University in which subjects were shown different
sets of photographs or words multiple times in different orders. The scientists recorded subjects' brain activity
while they studied the material. They were asked to recall or recognize those items between 30 minutes and six
hours later, in order to test the decades-old "encoding variability theory."

That theory suggests people will remember something more effectively -- the name of the third President of the
United States, for example -- if they study it at different times in different contexts -- a dorm room, the library, a
coffee shop -- than if they review it several times in one sitting. The different sensory experiences will give the
brain various reminders of that information and multiple routes to access Thomas Jefferson's identity.

Based on that theory, Poldrack and his colleagues predicted subjects would retain memories of the photos or
words more effectively if their brains were activated in different ways while studying that information multiple
times.

Instead, the scientists found the subjects' memories were better when their pattern of brain activity was more
similar across the different study episodes.

Xue cautioned that the study does not disprove the effect of variable contexts during learning in enhancing
memory.

It's unclear what prompts the brain to exhibit these different patterns of activity when studying the same
information minutes apart. That activity could be triggered by anything from the previous image the person saw,
to sounds or smells around him or even simple daydreaming, Poldrack says.

"These results are very important in providing a challenge to this well established theory," Poldrack says.
"There's something that's clearly still right about the theory, but this challenges psychologists to reconsider what
we know about it."