EUROPE: If you’ve had a good night’s sleep, you are mentally more alert and your memory works more reliably. During sleep, a part of our forebrain called the prefrontal cortex remains active. It ensures that memories and learned information are transferred to our long-term memory. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Göttingen and Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich have now decoupled the production of growth factor IGF2 from the sleep-wake rhythm and found that it improved long-term memory in mice. This could also have been due to a disturbed sleep-wake rhythm. However, older mice exhibited abnormal behaviour. High levels of IGF2 and a permanently disrupted sleep rhythm evidently damage the brain over the long term. This finding is medically significant because IGF2 is a candidate substance for improving memory impairment in Alzheimer patients.
Much of what we learn during the day is stored temporarily in the hippocampus. Later, during the transition from the waking to the sleep phase, the memories are consolidated. During sleep, memory traces are transferred to other brain regions for permanent storage. Sleep therefore plays a key role in how memories are moved from short-term to long-term memory.
Scientists have identified several mechanisms that control memory formation and regulate sleep-wake cycles, but they still do not know how the two processes interact at the molecular level. “We wanted to find out how sleep-wake regulation affects memory consolidation,” says Ali Shahmoradi from the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine. The research group tracked down the effect of a specific molecule: insulin-like growth factor 2 (IGF2). “The polypeptide evidently accelerates the consolidation of declarative memory, which is memory that can be consciously recalled. Mice with high IGF2 levels in the cerebral cortex learn faster,” says Moritz Rossner, who led the study at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen.
Tesla driverless system to use updated radar technology
WASHINGTON: Electric carmaker Tesla announced Sunday it was upgrading its Autopilot software to use more advanced radar technology. In a...
