When you sleep, the brain is really learning automatically!The first human experimental evidence: accelerate 1-4 times the weight

Mengchen from the quantity of the Temple of the Temple | Public Account QBITAI

I just read a few pages or words before going to bed, and when I woke up, I found that it was very impressive.

I wonder if you have a similar experience?

Scientists have always wanted to study this phenomenon, but they have been restricted by technical conditions before, and it is difficult to collect signals in the weaker neural activity in human brains at night.

With the development of wireless transmission technology recently, the opportunity has finally come.

In the experiment involved in volunteers, researchers for the first time obtained the direct evidence of the "rearrassment" of the human brain sports cortex during sleep.

Daniel Rubin of Harvard Medical College said: Harvard Medical School said:

Our discovery was incredible, and he (volunteer) basically practiced automatically all night while sleeping.

Related papers have been published on the Journal of Neuroscience, a well -known journal in the field of neuroscience.

The brain accelerates learning when you sleep

The volunteer code T11 was unfortunately paralyzed due to spinal cord injury.

He implanted the invasive brain interface electrode of the BRAINGATE project team, and used the same set of equipment as the T5 Master T5 who participated in the idea of ​​typing last year.

In this experiment, T11 needs to play a simple video game during the day:

First observe the order of lighting in the color area, and then move the cursor in order according to the memory control cursor.

This is a classic task in the research of the brain interface. The mode of neural activity is easier to capture and recognize, and it has also appeared many times before.

For ten consecutive days, T11 needs to be trained at 13: 45-16: 00 in the afternoon, and sleep until 23 pm until 9am the next day.

During training, the brain interface can be decoded in real time and records the neural activity of his brain motor cortex.

T11 did not tell the specific content of this experiment. It was just a recovery training as usual, and fell asleep as usual at night.

But in these ten days, the researchers compared the data recorded by his brain interface with the data of the day when he slept.

After processing the data with Karman filtering and other means, it is found that the neurons at night will be interval with a higher frequency than expected frequency.

The neuron discharge mode in T11 is highly consistent with the daytime training, and even several times is completely consistent.

△ Data starting at 0:50 in the morning and visual demonstration

The scientific name of this phenomenon is called Offline Replay, which has been verified during the day rest of mice and humans during the day.

The replacement during human sleep was first observed.

And data shows that the speed of night release is 1-4 times faster than during the day.

In other words, when you sleep, your brain is not only the content you learned during the day, but also accelerate your learning.

And all of this you don't know yourself.

The more difficult the task, the more active the brain

There was also a series of studies before, which verified that the neural activity of the hippocampus and the new cortex in mice can practice the maze.

And the phenomenon of offline replacement when humans rest during the day.

After combining these discoveries with the experimental results, the researchers put forward a point of view:

Replay learning may be a reserved mechanism across the brain, including semantics, navigation and motion control systems. And further support the role of sleep in memory consolidation.

In addition, this study also verified several previous important discoveries:

First, the time to reactor is mainly in the biological sense of slow wave sleep (Slow-Wave Sleep). The more common name is non-reM Stage, or deep sleep.

Second, the replay activities are highly related to the Sharp Wave Ripple caused by the hippocampus.

Sword ripples are the rapid outbreak of neurons synchronous activity, which will form a high -frequency shock.

△ The relationship between replacement and sharp ripples

Third, the more difficult the task of practicing during the day, the stronger the reunion when sleeping.

In the future plan, the research team of Braingate Alliance intends to systematically change the difficulty of task and conduct deeper research.

The Brame Alliance was jointly sponsored by clinicians, neurosciences and Brown University, Harvard Medical College, MIT and other institutions. The goal was to use brain -machine interface technology to help patients who lost their limbs due to neuropathy or damage.

One more thing

Since the brain is consolidating memory during the deep sleep phase, what is the brain doing at the stage of rapid eye movement (that is, the stage with the most dreamy dreams)?

The last papers of Science explained this before.

During the rapid eye movement, the MCH neuron that is responsible for secreting melanin clustering hormones in the hippocampus will help the brain to actively forget the unimportant information.

Dreaming of the rapid eye movement period, at this time, MCH neurons are active, which is one of the reasons why the content of the dream will be forgotten after waking up.

So, have you awakened and remember the content you saw the day before?

Thesis address: https://www.jneurosci.org/content/42/25/5007

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