“During sleep, a magical process happens.” Researchers have found that gently stimulating the brain’s frontal lobe in sync with the electrical waves of the hippocampus during sleep can improve the accuracy of memory recall in patients with epilepsy.
The researchers called this type of stimulation “synced.” They also tested another form of stimulation, called “mixed-phase,” where the electrode delivered pulses into the frontal lobe without regard to activity in the hippocampus.
The researchers found that after the synced stimulation, recognition of the previously learned famous people was better than after the night without intervention. This improvement wasn’t seen in patients who had been exposed to mixed-phase stimulation, indicating that the timing of stimulation was critical to boosting memory.
This increase in memory accuracy was reflected in the brain’s physiology, too. The team found that the synced stimulation caused an increase in sleep spindles—bursts of neural activity known to play a role in memory consolidation. According to Geva-Sagiv, patients with the most improvement in memory accuracy also had the largest increase in sleep spindles.
Michael Zugaro, a neuroscientist at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Biology at the College de France, who was unaffiliated with the study, had previously seenin memory consolidation after a related form of synced stimulation in rats. “It’s interesting to see that these general principles that we can find in different species also apply to humans,” he says.
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