A novel study suggests that broken sleep affects the ability to build memories. It could help to explicate memory problems associated with the conditions counting Alzheimer’s and sleep apnoea. The mice study conducted by the Stanford University revealed that disrupting sleep made it hard for rodents to recognize familiar objects.
The mice study observed the sleep that was fragment, but not shorter or less intense than the normal. It made use of technique known as optogentics, where precise cells are heritably wangled so that they can be controlled by light. They aimed a kind of brain cells, which plays a significant role in switching between the states of being sleep and being awake.
Then researchers sent pulses of light directly into the brains of mice while they slept. These light pulses could disrupt their sleep without affecting total time of sleep or quality of sleep. Then they place the rodents in a box with two objects, one of which they had already encountered with.
The rodents would logically spend more time examining the newer object and those who had been permitted uninterrupted sleep did just that. But, the rodents whose sleep had been interrupted were evenly addicted to both objects, suggests their memories had been affected. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
According to lead researcher Dr Luis de Lecea, sleep continuity is one of the main aspects that are affected in various pathological conditions, which impact memory, including Alzheimer’s and other age-related cognitive decline. Broken sleep also affected people those addicted to alcohol and those suffering from sleep aponea.
The researchers found no evidence of a causal link between sleep disruption and any of these conditions. However, they concluded that despite the total amount of sleep or sleep intensity, a minimum unit of uninterrupted sleep is essential form memory consolidation. During the day, people accrue all these memories, explained sleep expert Dr Neil Stanley, a former chairman of the British Sleep Society.
At some point they have to sift through what has happened during the day. There are some things that need to be locked down as a permanent hard memory. That process happens in deep sleep. So anything that affects sleep will have an effect on that process to a greater or a lesser extent, added Dr Stanley.