Older adults’ forgetfulness tied to faulty brain rhythms in sleep
Sleep is so vital to health.New findings published in the journal Neuron have found that older brains may forget more because they lose their rhythm at night, “during deep sleep, older people have less coordination between two brain waves that are important to saving new memories.” The study was the result of an effort to understand how the sleeping brain turns short-term memories into memories that can last a lifetime. NPR, December 18, 2017.‘>2
After a night’s sleep, researchers had the volunteers take a test to see just how many word pairs they could still remember. And what they found was that their performance was directly related to how well their “slow waves and spindles had synchronized during deep sleep.”NPR, December 18, 2017.‘>4
A likely reason that older brains lack the of coordination of brain waves is that as we age, the part of our brain that involves the production of deep sleep naturally begins to atrophy (and, people with more atrophy had less rhythm in the brain). And this atrophy can be much worse in people with Alzheimer’s.
However, Walker’s study also seemed to suggest that “it’s possible to improve an impaired memory by re-synchronizing brain rhythms during sleep,”
