Dr. John L. Turner Blog

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Erlier, I posted information about how neurons of the hippocampus interact with cortical neurons during sleep to strengthen memory. For the past 8 years, I have been experimenting with nightly us of an iPOD (then the iTuch and now the great Droid), listening not to music, but to audio books from topic in astronomy, to C2C, consciusness, physics and more!

 But look, it may be working: Brain listens, learns while we sleep

 "We are beginning to see that deep sleep actually is a key time for memory processing," Paller says. "Our little experiment opens the door to many questions." For example, would high-school students do better on SAT tests if daytime studying was supplemented with sleep sounds at night? Would students learning foreign vocabulary words or other facts do better in the morning after listening to related information as they slept?"

    More information on memory appeared yesterday in the New York Times. It has been known that propranolol may reduce or eliminate certain memories and perhaps this drug, commonly used to treat hypertension, familiar tremor and other disorders could conceivably be used in a critical care setting to ease the impact of trauma, and other conditions which could lead to painful recalled memories and PTSD.

   The recent report by Dr. Todd C. Sacktor of SUNY Downstate Medical Center, in Brooklyn, suggests that there is a substance that the brain utilizes to retain learned information. Ten years ago, Dr.s. Lichtman and Sanes of Harvard reported that 117 molecules were involved in the long-term potentiation of memory. Now, PKMzeta has been identified as a substance that is activated and intimately involved with the memory process. When experimental animals were injected with ZIP (a substance which interferes with PKMzeta), certain memory were erased. When rats were trained to avoid certain "hot" areas (electric shock) of their cage, and retained this memory as demonstrated by removing them for a time and then, upon re-entry to the cage they remembered and avoided the hot spots, . . . ZIP would zap that memory and they were in effected, "shocked" all over again!

   If the human brain could be entrained to generate more PKMzeta, this could lead to a cure for cognitive impairment in diseases such as Alzheimer's disease.

 To be continued . . .