Although the sense of smell may seem intuitive, almost automatic, it is one of the first things that go wrong in neurodegenerative disorders (Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, etc.) and now a team of researchers from the NYU Langone Medical Center (USA) has discovered It is the memory of specific odors that depends on the brain’s ability to learn, process and remember accurately during the deep sleep phase.
The researchers conducted an experiment with rats that showed that their olfactory memory was strengthened when smells detected the day before were repeated during sleep. To reach this conclusion, the team of scientists trained a group of rats to recognize odors through conditioning. Thus, they found that when an odor boost occurred during sleep, the rats’ memories deepened even when they were awake . In contrast, when rats were exposed to an unfamiliar scent pattern during sleep, they ended up with false memories of many different smells.
“Our results confirm the importance of brain activity during sleep for memory strength and accuracy ; We believe that during slow wave sleep, neurons in the brain communicate with each other, and in doing so, strengthen their connections, allowing for the storage of specific information, ”says Donald A. Wilson, professor in the departments of Child Psychiatry and Langone’s Adolescent and Neuroscience and Physiology and lead author of the study.
This discovery, published in the Journal of Neuroscience , is the first to show that memory accuracy is impaired during short-wave sleep.
