The Benefits of Sleep

           “If you die in your dream then you’ll die in real life too!” This was a belief I often heard whispered with reverence on the playground in my younger years. Older kids would nod sagely, as if they had a friend who had died in such a manner. For as kids, sleep was special and mysterious- and we all wanted more of it. But as we grow older, the specialness of sleep seems to fade as we focus more on getting at least the minimal amount of sleep needed for functioning. According to the Center for Disease Control, one in three Americans is sleep deprived, usually chronically. And this lack of sleep, however, impacts the important role sleep has in maintaining our mental health. Without adequate rest, we are prone to act in irrational and non-adaptive ways (such as binging on sweets or becoming easily upset).

        Although much research has focused on the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation, further research is need to understand what happens during this portion of non-consciousness. As far as we can tell, every living thing from trees to flies has some form of sleep or quiescence (quiet resting) during which it recovers from previous activity. In smaller, simpler organisms, this quiescence might only include clearing cellular debris but in more complicated organisms this sleep period is also important for changes in the brain. In humans, sleep is a privileged period of time when the brain doesn’t have to take in external information. Instead the mind prioritizes shuffling and re-organizing information learned during the day. We call this process of organizing and solidifying information memory consolidation. Most scientists agree that this process is always going on, but is especially prevalent during sleep. Memory consolidation is one reason why consistent sleep is so important for our daily lives.

        When we are sleep deprived, we restrict our brain’s ability to organize and prepare for the next day. This means that we are more likely to be forgetful, impulsive, and moody. College students who assume that they will do better in the exam by pulling an all-nighter are actually making it more difficult for themselves to succeed. Sleep deprivation is especially damaging because the part of our brain necessary for forming memories, the hippocampus, is particularly sensitive to sleep deprivation. It’s almost like a switch where at a certain point you are unable to learn and retain almost any information you are studying late into the night.

In addition to impairing memory, not getting enough sleep can also lead to motor control problems. If you’ve ever noticed that you seem to be less coordinated after staying up all night (or not getting enough sleep for a prolonged period of time), the loss of sleep is probably to blame. Coordinated motor control, especially for fine motor control is actually a complicated mental ability. So when you are sleep deprived, you aren’t able to respond as quickly or accurately to your surroundings. This problem has serious implications for professional truckers or others who drive long distances. In America, more than 1550 people are now killed by sleep-deprived automotive drivers.

The above mentioned problems are only a few of the consequences of sleep deprivation on the brain. In recent years there has been an escalating interest in the cognitive effects of sleep and why sleep is so important for a huge variety of mental abilities. But despite the accumulating evidence of sleep’s importance, Americans still tend to habitually stay up late and rise too early- putting us at a constant disadvantage. Thankfully, there are a few simple tricks that have been shown to help the chronically sleep deprived get some rest. First, going to sleep and waking at a consistent time each day helps us set our internal clock so it’s easier to fall asleep and we get quality rest. Another simple trick is treating your bedroom as a place reserved for sleep. Avoid watching TV or playing video games in bed as this creates a mental association between your bed and these activities instead of sleep. These tricks, along with avoiding caffeine in the evening, can greatly improve your ability to get restful sleep.

So maybe the schoolyard wisdom about dying in your dreams doesn’t hold up to modern science. In fact, the relationship seems to go the other way: a prolonged lack of sleep can actually cause death. But schoolyard children are right to think of sleep with awe and wonder.

There is some truth in the thought that sleep is a special period of time important to our health and well-being. We should retain some of that awe and wonder from our childhood years and realize how special sleep is.


Footnotes:
I would like to say a special word of thanks to ComSciCon16 for helping me craft this piece. It's a wonderful convention/program that has provided me with lots of feedback, as well as helping me make connections with other interested science communicators.  

Quick Update: Conclusion of my Research Abroad

Iliana's first night here and we stumbled onto a wine festival!

So I blinked, and now all of the sudden I'm on my last week in Lübeck... Where did the time go? Well, most of it has been spent double- and triple-checking all the equipment is working for our study. Because we are doing simultaneous EEG and fMRI, there are a lot of moving parts that could derail the study. Thankfully, I think we're finally worked out the last of the issues! This week, my last week in Germany, marks the beginning of data collection. Our first participant is this Wednesday, with hopefully more to be scheduled soon after. And although I'm leaving, my lab mate Iliana is taking over for the next 3 weeks.

So while I won't be here for the majority of the data collection, I'll still be helping from afar to make sure this project continues smoothly. Anyways, for family & friends who want to know what my last few weeks have been like, I've added some pictures below of my recent adventures!

While Daniel, my boyfriend, visited we put him to work as a pilot subject!

A visit to the CHOCOLATE MUSEUM in Hamburg = heaven

Urban beehives at the world-famous restaurant "Noma" in Copenhagen

Meals are reservation only and run about $400... Obviously we didn't go

Photo courtesy of Daniel- Copenhagen wanderings

Being ridiculous at Tivoli (amusement park in Copenhagen)

Copenhagen's iconic Little Mermaid statue in honor of Hans Christian Anderson

Daniel and Ariel ;)

A bamboo bicycle at the Danish Museum of Design

I would have had more pictures from recent adventures in Copenhagen and Hamburg (where I got to give a small guest lecture!), but my phone's camera has been non-operational for the last few weeks. So I'm looking forward to returning home not only to resume data collection for my master's project, but also so I can get this phone problem resolved! Chicago, Il- Here I come!

Cross Country Collaboration

Yes, those wires are electrified...

This past Saturday, I completed the 11 mile/22 obstacle course of the Chicago Tough Mudder.

We  survived!

The very next day, I left the country for Lübeck, Germany.

Situated along the Baltic Sea, Lübeck was once a powerhouse of the Hanseatic League. 

My head is still spinning from the quick turn around! It's surreal to be sitting at a new desk at the Universität zu Lübeck, and yet be working on a project that I've had on my to-do list for months. Sometime earlier this year, my advisor broached the topic of collaborating with Dr. Heldmann & Dr. Münte on a sleep fMRI project. Of course, I immediately volunteered myself and started working on the study design, along with another graduate student from my lab. However, I'm the first of the two of us to make it to Lübeck. My lab mate wont join me in Germany for another 2 weeks, by which time I hope to have finished piloting and be ready to move into data collection.

Most of my time so far has been dedicated to finding the appropriate stimuli for German participants. We piloted the behavioral aspects of the study in Chicago but it seems famous locations to us aren't nearly as well known here. That being said, most of the preparation I did at Northwestern has ended up being very helpful.

My new ride for the next month, she's old but strong!

Our next step will be to set up everything in the fMRI scanner and make sure we have our timing down. While piloting a few different sequences, I'll finally get to be the participant in the scanner! After all these years (5 years!) of being involved with imaging research, I'll finally get to take a peek at my brain! I can't tell you how exciting that is to me! And after we sort out how we will be collecting the brain images, we'll get right to the piloting phase!

But that's looking pretty far ahead. I haven't even been in Lübeck for a full week yet. So far, I've managed to figure out the grocery store and purchased an old bicycle so I can bike to work rather than taking the bus. So for my immediate future, my current plan is to finally explore the city this weekend and enjoy the fact that I'm living abroad!

What should happen to memory for events that occur within an emotional context?

Before addressing what happens to memories within an emotional context, I would first like to argue that there is no such thing as not having an emotional context during encoding or retrieval of memories. We may not always have a strong valence for everything that happens in our lives, but we are constantly experiencing emotion of some sort. Whether that experience is low-level like boredom or fatigue, or high level such as in deep sorrow or great joy, I cannot imagine a time where I have not experienced some mood. But for the sake of argument, I will focus on memories that occur during a strong emotional context.

            According to current memory literature, both positive and negative memories are better encoded than less emotionally salient experiences. Based on fMRI studies, (among other mechanisms) this deeper encoding is most likely due to amygdala activation- both for positive and negative memories. In a 2006 study by Kensinger and Schacter, they found activation of the amygdala during encoding for positive and negative items. This activity later predicted recall for these emotionally salient items. However, this effect did not extend beyond highly emotional items. In keeping with my earlier statement, I would argue that the amygdala actually was engaged even during the more neutral items, but that the activation was so weak that it could not be picked up in the fMRI BOLD signal. In any case, this research demonstrates that the limbic system, and the amygdala in particular, are more active during emotionally charged situations and allow for deeper encoding.

It makes evolutionary sense that emotionally engaging experiences (especially negative ones) should be better encoded. It’s beneficial for an organism to remember to avoid negative experiences that hurt its chance of survival, and positive experiences should be better remembered in order to seek out similar beneficial situations. Thus, it is unsurprising that highly emotional memories engage neural systems beyond the medial temporal lobe.

However, extreme mood at memory retrieval can occasionally be detrimental. In a 2005 research study, researchers found that inducing a positive mood during recall led to more false memories in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. However, inducing negative mood during recall did not show this effect. This research demonstrates that while heightened emotion during encoding can be overall beneficial, that same state during retrieval ends up causing people to falsely identify lure items as old. Thus, extreme emotion can be a double-edged sword when it comes to memory.

Works Cited:

Guastella, A. J., Mitchell, P. B., & Mathews, F. (2008). Oxytocin enhances the encoding of positive social memories in humans. Biological psychiatry, 64(3), 256-258.

Kensinger, E. A., & Schacter, D. L. (2006). Amygdala activity is associated with the successful encoding of item, but not source, information for positive and negative stimuli. The Journal of Neuroscience, 26(9), 2564-2570.

Storbeck, J., & Clore, G. L. (2005). With sadness comes accuracy; with happiness, false memory mood and the false memory effect. Psychological Science, 16(10), 785-791.

Why do we forget?

Thanks to brain training companies, it seems everyone is trying to increase his or her memory. It’s easy to argue that better memory can only positively impact your life, but in fact forgetting serves an equally important role in cognition. Specifically, forgetting is necessary for two reasons- forgetting (especially of details) allows for automatized skills and semantic encoding and forgetting is emotionally adaptive to neglect some painful or negative memories.

First let us examine the case of AJ, a woman with highly superior autobiographic memory. If you were to ask AJ what happened 20 years ago on April 11, she could list exactly what she wore that day, along with all of her activities. Her memory is able to retain an episodic account of nearly every day of her life. However, this ability deeply intrudes on her life. She reports, “Most have called it a gift but I call it a burden. I run my entire life through my head every day and it drives me crazy” (Parker et al., 2006, p. 35). Imagine every time you went to the grocery store, you remembered every other instance of a trip to buy milk. It would be cognitively taxing and unnecessary to sustain all these individual memories. And in fact, a study by Logan and Crump (2009) demonstrated the necessity of losing detailed memory in professional typists, who aren’t able to verbalize where keys are located or how their hands are moving. Yet these workers are still extremely proficient in their job, and when they are asked to explicitly focus on what their hands are doing, their performance suffers. These typists do not have detailed memory of every time they sat down at a keyboard, but their skill demonstrates that a composite of all those experiences meshed together have given them their proficiency. Thus, forgetting may allow for details of episodes to be removed so that abstraction and generalized skill learning can occur.

As mentioned before, forgetting not only benefits cognition, but also assists in emotional stability. Joorman and colleagues (2009), among many others, have demonstrated that depression is linked to an inability to forget negative memories. Perhaps if we were able to remember every embarrassing moment and social faux pas, we would be less likely to take social risks or even engage with others at all. Forgetting negative experiences can help us stay open to new social experiences or maintain important relationships. Going back to the case of AJ, she was diagnosed with both depression and anxiety, maybe because she couldn’t forget her negative experiences. Thus, AJ exemplifies that there is no evolutionary benefit to remembering every negative experience.

Memory is unequivocally important for many functions, but forgetting also serves a purpose in maintaining healthy functioning. Without forgetting, we might be less positive about the future and unwilling to take the big risks that advance science and other fields. We would also be unable to garner abstract information from multiple situations or sources we encounter. Like tow sides of the same coin, forgetting and remembering balance each other.

Works Cited

Joormann, J., Hertel, P. T., LeMoult, J., & Gotlib, I. H. (2009). Training forgetting of negative material in depression. Journal of abnormal psychology, 118(1), 34.

Logan, G. D., & Crump, M. J. (2009). The Left Hand Doesn't Know What the Right Hand Is Doing The Disruptive Effects of Attention to the Hands in Skilled Typewriting. Psychological Science, 20(10), 1296-1300.

Nørby, S. (2015). Why Forget? On the Adaptive Value of Memory Loss.Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(5), 551-578.

Parker, E. S., Cahill, L., & McGaugh, J. L. (2006). A case of unusual autobiographical

            remembering. Neurocase, 12(1), 35-49.

How to talk science without sounding like a pompous jerk

The class I am taking this summer is rather unique, though it certainly shouldn't be. I'm trying to develop lifelong skills necessary (in my opinion) for success in academia, but they are skills woefuly ignored. Specifically, I'm trying to learn to be a better communicator with those outside my field of research.

Video interviewing at Medill

As students in classes taught by famous, yet boring professors can attest- being a great researcher does not mean you are a great communicator. It doesn't even mean you are a good one.  Northwestern University offers a wonderful program to help turn this pattern around, called 'Ready, Set, Go!' The aim of this program is to help scientists and researchers across all disciplines to disseminate their work to the broader world. It's a surprisingly daunting task.

For one thing, content really does matter. On my first day with the other students, I realized that my research is at somewhat of an advantage. I study human systems (memory and sleep) so they are easier to understand intuitively. My classmates studying nanoparticles or non-newtonian fluids have a lot more jargon to deal with the complex systems they study. Learning to cut back the three-plus syllable words is only the first step. We have also learned how to use analogies, craft stories, and pull approachable aspects of our research to the forefront. All of these pieces must fit together to create a coherent story.

Beyond storytelling, there are also other aspects to consider. For instance, this week we spent our class time in the Medill television studio to record interviews on our research. It quickly became apparent that outside of knowing the research, we had to know how to turn a question towards a topic we want to discuss and and leave hooks for other points you want to make, so the interviewer can pick them up.

And of course, we must remember the physical aspects of a tv interview. To look like a credible source, you need to dress the part. Wearing bold colors (but no patterns), sitting at the edge of the chair to avoid slumping, and wearing a suit jacket are all tricks that you only realize after watching yourself on the screen. Although I still feel there are many things I'd like to tweak on my interview, I think my last take was a solid of example of how to put some of the skills I've learned into action.

Of course, the class isn't quite over yet. I will be making a final video where I will explain my research in full, and hopefully get to play with some neat video editing tools. I will certainly be posting that video, along with a recap, when the summer ends.

But for now, I'm actually going on holiday to Europe. I'll try to post updates of my trip here, though don't expect too much science- I'll mostly be enjoying local culture and food!

Modelling Biological Processes using Technology

I was recently at a lecture in which the presenter referred to the "circuitry of long term memory" and I was stuck by how often we refer to anatomy as a physical system. Talking about circuits and pathways and such leads one to think in almost mechanical terms on how our organic bodies function. It's a helpful short cut to explain things in terms that are easier for a layman to follow.

It's a practice especially prevalent in neuroscience, although that is the area with which I am most familiar. In any case, I realized that this trend has been going on for quite some time and is often dependent on the current state of our technology. Take for example how the the famous Galen of the Roman Empire thought the blood system worked. "Galen incompletely perceived the function of the heart, believing it a "productor of heat", while the function of its affluents, the arteries, was that of cooling the blood as the lungs "...fanned and cooled the heart itself". Galen thought that during dilation the arteries sucked in air, while during their contraction they discharged vapours through pores in the flesh and skin."

This pumpe system as Galen saw it, was based on the ancient Roman understanding of heating and cooling similar to their intricate water ducts system.  The technology of the day formed how people thought the human body functioned. In modern lingo, cognitive scientists often speak of 'serial/parallel processing' or 'streams of information' and this all calls to mind the inner workings of a computer.

I have to wonder, in the future when we have some new fantastic technology will we compare it to another anatomical feature of ourselves? Or is it our embodied experience that allows us to come up with such technology because we are actually mirroring it after ourselves?

Anthropomorphizing Science

One of the graduate classes I'm currently taking is called Biology of Sleep. It's a new class through the neuroscience department, so we don't have a rigorous structure. Each week, we discuss a new topic in relation to the biological basis of sleep and/or circadian rhythms. When I signed up, I thought this class would be right up my alley. I have a relatively strong background in sleep and my advanced biology classes are only 2 years in my past and thus relatively fresh.

Super cute idea, the rest are at: http://kcd-elements.tumblr.com/

Turns out, I was absolutely wrong. This class has been incredibly difficult, especially when we have to read papers with terminology I can't even recall. This week, we focused on sleep, metabolism and obesity so I was expecting something about eating behaviors changing with a lack of sleep. Instead, we got this. I didn't know I was signing up for advanced genetics and biochemistry when I decided to take the class.

So in reading these highly technical and complicated papers, I've taken to anthropomorphizing ligands and kinases to tell myself a story and follow the molecular cycles. I create heros and villians who steal or give electrons in redox reactions. It's a form of mental shorthand for me to get the gist on these otherwise extremely difficult papers.

This is the kind of thing I memorize using stories

But I wonder, is this a good thing to do? Sure, it helps get the 'basic storyline' of the paper and what's happening in the cell, but is this a good way to teach students? I came up with the technique for my own personal use, but I wonder if professors find such an idea useful or not. The downside is that by creating a story, you give agency to things which do not think or feel. ATP doesn't get its feelings hurt when it phosphorylates and becomes ADP. Lysosomes aren't homicidal killers of proteins. These molecular components don't have feelings or motivations, which a story implies.

So what's your opinion? Is it worth learning information in a story format helpful for memory retention? Or harmful because of the associated assumptions?

Don't take notes on your laptop

Hello 2015! I can't believe the year passed so quickly and it's already a new year! I had a wonderful winter vacation in the sunny state of Texas, but now it's back to the grad school grind. This quarter is particularly looking to be extremely busy. I'll be taking classes, running my own study, and TAing for the first time. That's a lot to accomplish in just a few months. Luckily the winter weather keeps me inside, so I suppose I'll be more productive.

When it's cold out, why not drive to Wisconsin for some cheese?

As for the main meat of this post, I learned something rather unsurprising, yet interesting, in the class I'm TAing. (TA= Teacher's Assistant) I'm TAing developmental psychology which is an upper divsion psychology course. Before we got into the meat of the class, the professor presented some research she conducted on previous classes. She and several other professors conducted an observational study whereby they looked at technology usage of their students and grades earned in that class. Below are the results.

As you can see, those who didn't use a laptop scored the highest in the course on average. Second highest were those who reported staying on task while using their laptops to take notes in class, although they still earned a significantly lower grade than those with no technology. Students who reported being off-task on the laptop (ie, internet browsing, email, etc) scored just as poorly as those who claimed to be multi-tasking. This result might surprise some, but previous research has shown that humans are incredibly bad at multi-tasking. Having to flit from one thing to another makes us bad at all of them overall. According to this study, you might as well just be off-task!

Personally, I've always noticed that I have trouble focusing on class when I have my comnputer out. I am better at remembering information when I write it, rather than type. It seems old-fashioned, but I much prefer carrying a bunch of spirals around instead of a laptop. I'm just glad real research supports my own habits. I have to wonder, when I'm a professor will I allow my students to use laptops? I think not, though maybe we will be such a technology-driven society that I wont have much of a choice. That's a long way away so I better just focus on surviving this quarter!

Brave New World (of sleep research!)

If you've ever read Brave New World (and I sincerely hope that you have), then you probably remember the strange hypnopaedic training used to keep people thinking as the World State wants them to. Basically, the State trains citizens from childhood by using softly spoken mantras played in their sleep.  These constantly repeated ideas are designed to keep them from rising above their prescribed station in life by cuing them to how they should think. When I first heard of this idea, I thought it interesting but outlandish. I'm not so sure about that anymore.

You see, the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Northwestern University has recently delved into a research vein similar to Huxley's idea. In a very easy-to-understand paper,  members of my lab tested whether sounds played at night can actually help with memory the next day.

The paradigm went like this- participants learned where 50 objects were located on the screen and each object was paired with a matching unique sound. So they would learn the tea kettle is in the upper right corner and that a kettle whistle is associated with that picture. Next, participants took a nap and during the deep sleep stage, half of the sounds they heard were replayed to them (without waking them up). When they woke up, they were tested on how well they could remember where the objects belonged. Results showed that participants remembered more of the objects that were cued while they were asleep, and were better at closely matching where those images went on the screen. Basically, it seems like playing the sounds reactivated the memory traces during sleep and helped consolidate them to make a stronger memory!

And this research doesn't just extend to visuospatial learning. Another member of my lab showed that participants can better learn to play a keyboard to produce a melody that's been cued during sleep rather than one that hasn't. So it appears this memory reactivation is multimodal, even when we sleep.

I cannot tell you how fascinating I find this research. Currently, I'm working on a project regarding implicit memory but I'm dying to get my toes wet in some sleep-memory research. I just haven't found the right research question yet.

Let me know if these projects bring any questions/ponderings to mind!

Creative on Demand

I feel like I have some idea of how many people in the creative field must experience their work. There's something very mentally straining in trying to be creative on demand. As a first year graduate student, I am supposed to jump right into research and get my feet wet. In other words, I am expected to  have a first year project. Generally, this isn't too much of a problem as advisors constantly have pet projects that they need someone to work on.

However, I was blessed with a very flexible advisor who is happy to let me approach problems that I find personally engaging. That means when I first met with him and asked about a first year project, he lobbed it back into my court and asked what I wanted to do. Thus, I've been asked to be creative on demand.

The thing is, you can't really be creative if you're stressed out. I'm someone who loves to have my entire schedule all planned out and obvious. But you can't plan how to come up with something as big as "what do I want to research?" So it has been a struggle.

But I think if I take some of the pressure off, I might be able to harness that intuitive thinking and come up with a cool first year project.