Cornell University researchers discover that pupil contraction during non-REM sleep strengthens new memories, while dilation replays older ones. This separation prevents 'catastrophic forgetting' and offers insights into memory enhancement.
Cornell University researchers have found the pupil is key to understanding how, and when, the brain forms strong, long-lasting memories. By studying mice equipped with brain electrodes and tiny eye-tracking cameras, the researchers determined that new memories are being replayed and consolidated when the pupil is contracted during a substage of non-REM sleep. When the pupil is dilated, the process repeats for older memories.
The brain's ability to separate these two substages of sleep with a previously unknown micro-structure is what prevents 'catastrophic forgetting' in which the consolidation of one memory wipes out another one. The findings could lead to better memory enhancement techniques for humans and may help computer scientists train artificial neural networks to be more efficient. The study was led by assistant professors Azahara Oliva and Antonio Fernandez-Ruiz. Over the course of a month, a group of mice was taught a variety of tasks, such as collecting water or cookie rewards in a maze. Then the mice were outfitted with brain electrodes and tiny spy cameras that hung in front of their eyes to track their pupil dynamics. One day, the mice learned a new task and when they fell asleep, the electrodes captured their neural activity and the cameras recorded the changes to their pupils. 'Non-REM sleep is when the actual memory consolidation happens, and these moments are very, very short periods of time undetectable by humans, like 100 milliseconds,' Oliva said.'How does the brain distribute these screenings of memory that are very fast and very short throughout the overall night? And how does that separate the new knowledge coming in, in a way that it doesn't interfere with old knowledge that we already have in our minds?' The recordings showed that the temporal structure of sleeping mice is more varied, and more akin to the sleep stages in humans, than previously though
MEMORY SLEEP BRAIN PUPIL NEURAL NETWORK
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