Learn While You SleepContinued from page 1
Terry Sejnowski, professor and head of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, has also studied sleep's role in memory. Sejnowski sees Born's findings as an important advance in the study of memory consolidation. "Previous studies only showed that memory improvements were correlated with brain oscillations, and only for nonfactual forms of memory, such as motor learning," says Sejnowski. "This study provides evidence that the link between sleep and memory is causal and may lead to a practical way to improve memory." Born agrees with this last point, and he believes that someday electrical stimulation during sleep may be a possible therapy for those with memory-loss problems. However, others like Jerome Siegel are wary of linking sleep with memory. Siegel, a psychiatrist at the University of California at Los Angeles and head of its Center for Sleep Research, says that while sleep may have some role in forming memories, it is not an essential role. He warns that there is a danger in misinterpreting data when trying to establish a causal role. "You have to wonder to what extent you are getting chance results just because you measure a lot of variables," says Siegel. "Also, there's the performance issue, where if sleep is deeper, performance is better, and it's different from memory." In future studies, Born plans to tease out the many variables from this initial experiment by looking at the effects of specific currents and whether applying them for varying amounts of time will have significant effects. "We also have a plan to see if you can use stimulation not only to intensify an ongoing sleep stage like non-REM sleep," says Born, "but if you can, for example, change the brain state from the waking state into the sleeping state, which is so far what we see as a dream--the researcher's dream." |
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Sleep Analysis at Home
08/18/2009
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Comments
This Neuroscientist Jan Born, of the University of Lubeck stated in the final paragraph of the story:
"We also have a plan to see if you can use stimulation not only to intensify an ongoing sleep stage like non-REM sleep," says Born, "but if you can, for example, change the brain state from the waking state into the sleeping state, which is so far what we see as a dream--the researcher's dream."
For a Neuroscientist, they seem somewhat . . . un-knowing of things that were invented long before he matriculated, and, I daresay, long before he was born, such as electronarcosis, which was invented by Nikola Tesla around the start of the LAST century along with things like the remote control, radio, spark plug, Tesla coil, speedometer, robots, the electron gun used by CRTs,et cetera. He talked about it during a lecture delivered before the American Electro-Therapeutic Association, in Buffalo, New York on September 13, 1898. It was called "High Frequency Oscillators for Electro-Therapeutic and Other Purposes". He mentioned this in a letter to the editor of the New York Times on October 16th, 1907, if anyone would like to peruse the microfilmed copies of said paper. There was even an international symposium on it in Graz, Austria, in 1966.
Instead of giving you a long list of papers and books written on the subject, I'll instead suggest you try 'googling' the phrase "repressed technology" and see what you get. Likely, it'll give you a link back to one of my Web pages, that I've had up for several years. LOL It includes a short list of written material on the subject of electronarcosis for those who would like to learn more about it.
- CyberWoLfman
CyberWoLfman
11/07/2006
Posts:1