Sleep, perchance to remember –
“We’ve known for a long time that sleep plays an important role in learning and memory. If you don’t sleep well you won’t learn well." – (Yang, et. al. 2014)

We now know that 'learning' is processed into memory at the same stage of sleep as healing and growth – but deeper:
(1) the process of 'remembering' induces deeper sleep, therefore,
'learning' promotes healing and growth: "The Art of Longevity"
(2) physical healing is dependent on the quality of nutrient absorption.
(3) depression is recognised as a symptom of pH imbalance (acidosis: aka low oxygen).

"...knowledge of brainwave states enhances a person's ability to make use of the specialized characteristics of those states: these include being mentally productive across a wide range of activities, such as being intensely focused, relaxed, creative and in restful sleep."
Ned Herrmann, 1997, Scientific American Health Review

40 AMAZING FACTS ABOUT SLEEP YOU PROBABLY DIDN'T KNOW
(or were too tired to think about)
– National Sleep Research Project, Australia

Is Sleep Important?
We take sleep for granted, until poor sleep starts affecting us. Most of us only have the occasional sleep disturbance, while for others it can be quite an issue. And as many say, “we just live with it”
Naturopath / pharmacist Glenda Johnson explains: Why Sleep is Important
Short term Effects of Poor Sleep include:
- Tiredness and sleepiness during the day
- Increased sensitivity to stress or pain
- Poor judgment, emotions and mood
- Impaired memory and efficiency

Sleep and HD: Stanford University project.
“after you have pulled an all-nighter (or two), you are likely to have a keen perception of your body’s intrinsic drive to go to sleep.”
1. The importance of sleep
2. What happens during sleep
3. Sleep and circadian rhythm
4. Sleep disruption and Huntington’s disease
5. Sources

Alcohol leads to insomnia - 2022 study:
"The relationship between the two disorders is complicated and closely linked."
Key lesson:
Alcohol causes acidosis, which leads to low nutrient absorption followed by immune system breakdown
- and can be prevented by maintaining pH balance.

Why Broken Sleep is a golden time for creativity! By Karen Emslie, Oeon, May 2015 "People once woke up halfway through the night to think, write or make love. What have we lost by sleeping straight through? In the dead of night, drowsy brains can conjure up new ideas from the debris of dreams and apply them to our creative pursuits."

Image Credit: agsandrew / Shutterstock.com

i. Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice, 2004, PNAS
In these experiments, Tibetan Buddhist monks were asked to focus on compassion during meditation – "Practitioners understand “meditation,” or mental training, to be a process of familiarization with one's own mental life leading to long-lasting changes in cognition and emotion. Little is known about this process and its impact on the brain. . . . These data suggest that mental training involves temporal integrative mechanisms and may induce short-term and long-term neural changes." >>>more

ii. Brains of Buddhist monks scanned in meditation study
By Matt Danzico, BBC News, New York, 24 April 2011

Excerpt:
In a laboratory tucked away off a noisy New York City street, a soft-spoken neuroscientist has been placing Tibetan Buddhist monks into a car-sized brain scanner to better understand the ancient practice of meditation.
But could this unusual research not only unravel the secrets of leading a harmonious life but also shed light on some of the world's more mysterious diseases?
Zoran Josipovic, a research scientist and adjunct professor at New York University, says he has been peering into the brains of monks while they meditate in an attempt to understand how their brains reorganise themselves during the exercise. . . .
Dr Josipovic has scanned the brains of more than 20 experienced meditators, both monks and nuns who primarily study the Tibetan Buddhist style of meditation, to better understand this mysterious network. . . .
Self-reflection
Scientists previously believed the self-reflective, default network in the brain was simply one that was active when a person had no task on which to focus their attention.
But researchers have found in the past decade that this section of the brain swells with activity when the subject thinks about the self. >>> more

iii. Studies of Advanced Stages of Meditation in the Tibetan Buddhist and Vedic Traditions. I: A Comparison of General Changes (NCBI)
Alex Hankey, 2006

Abstract
This article is the first of two comparing findings of studies of advanced practitioners of Tibetan Buddhist meditation in remote regions of the Himalayas, with established results on long-term practitioners of the Transcendental Meditation programs. . . .
In the case of the Transcendental Meditation and TM–Sidhi Program, similar increases in coherence length have been observed in the alpha range of frequencies (51–53). Some of the Buddhist meditation techniques traditionally used (8) are closer to TM than those studied. This suggests further research to see if alpha and gamma frequencies can be influenced separately, or whether TM-like alpha stabilizing techniques have to be performed first, in order to gain the affective and emotional control required to succeed in a ‘contemplative’, mood-inducing practice. >>> more

iv. Increased Theta and Alpha EEG Activity During Nondirective Meditation
Jim Lagopoulos, et. al., 2009, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. Nov 2009,1187-1192.

Abstract
Objectives: In recent years, there has been significant uptake of meditation and related relaxation techniques, as a means of alleviating stress and maintaining good health. Despite its popularity, little is known about the neural mechanisms by which meditation works, and there is a need for more rigorous investigations of the underlying neurobiology. Several electroencephalogram (EEG) studies have reported changes in spectral band frequencies during meditation inspired by techniques that focus on concentration, and in comparison much less has been reported on mindfulness and nondirective techniques that are proving to be just as popular.

Design: The present study examined EEG changes during nondirective meditation. The investigational paradigm involved 20 minutes of acem meditation, where the subjects were asked to close their eyes and adopt their normal meditation technique, as well as a separate 20-minute quiet rest condition where the subjects were asked to close their eyes and sit quietly in a state of rest. Both conditions were completed in the same experimental session with a 15-minute break in between.

Results: Significantly increased theta power was found for the meditation condition when averaged across all brain regions. On closer examination, it was found that theta was significantly greater in the frontal and temporal–central regions as compared to the posterior region. There was also a significant increase in alpha power in the meditation condition compared to the rest condition, when averaged across all brain regions, and it was found that alpha was significantly greater in the posterior region as compared to the frontal region.

Conclusions: These findings from this study suggest that nondirective meditation techniques alter theta and alpha EEG patterns significantly more than regular relaxation, in a manner that is perhaps similar to methods based on mindfulness or concentration.
>>>more

The Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI), named after American researcher William "Ned" Herrmann "the father of brain-dominance technology" aka 'left-right brain thinking' or ‘whole-brain thinking’,
defined as
- Analytical thinking
- Sequential thinking
- Interpersonal thinking
- Imaginative thinking
Based on theories of the modularity of cognitive functions, including well-documented specializations in the brain's cerebral cortex and limbic systems, and the research into left-right brain laterilization …
See ”European Herrmann Institute FAQ - Archive.org
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT WHOLE BRAIN TECHNOLOGY
Q: I've heard of left brain/right brain, but how do we get to whole brain?
A: Upon superficial examination, the brain consists of two half brains and therefore the simplistic left brain/right brain dichotomy seems to adequately describe the differences between these two brain halves. Closer scrutiny of the brain reveals four structures rather than just two. ...The organizing principle of the brain and the physiology of the brain both proclaim a condition for wholeness. The brain is physically constructed so that specialized areas of processing can collaborate with other areas of specialization. We are not single individuals, but rather a coalition… >>>more

Lest we forget!
– the evolution of Visionary vs Analytical thought
The Alphabet vs The Goddess–The Conflict Between Word and Image (1998), by Dr. Leonard Shlain (1937-2009), San Francisco surgeon and
Professor of Medicine (specialising in blood-flow to the brain).
Professor Shlain proposes that the process of learning alphabetic literacy rewired the human brain, with profound consequences for culture.
Professor Shlain's 1998 Book launch lecture gives a comprehensive overview, including study notes, shared HERE

Cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, Professor Sara Mednick is the author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life (2006), and The Hidden Power of the Downstate (2022).

Dr. Mednick's 2010 conversation with Dr. Norman Swan AM FAHMS is so informative, I've taken the liberty of sharing the full transcript:

Sleep research - the power nap and creative thinking
The Health Report, ABC-Radio National, 15 March 2010
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, looked at the benefits of napping. And they also suggest that Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep enhances creative problem-solving.

Norman Swan: Sleep, if not a third of our lives as we're constantly exhorted to make it, is still a fair chunk of our time on this earth. Yet why we sleep and what the different phases of sleep actually mean are still a bit of a mystery.

Sleep proponents promise all sorts of things from refreshment to better memory and thinking performance to problem solving. Research at the University of California, San Diego has found that Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep is associated with better creative thinking. They've been studying REM sleep by engineering napping.

Dr. Sara Mednick is in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego.

Sara Mednick: The background to this study was that we realised that there were many creative people who said that they experienced insight into problems that they are having from dreams and dreams obviously occur during REM sleep. The way that we study sleep is through naps.

There are three major stages of sleep, stage two sleep, which is very light sleep, which has been shown to be improving alertness and motor memory and then there's slow wave sleep, which is a deeper sleep, which is that period between, say, 30 and 60 minutes of a full sleep. Or, let me just say a full sleep is what occurs over 90 minutes and you're going to go through three stages of sleep in those 90 minutes.

The first half an hour or first 20 minutes, say, is what's called stage two sleep, and stage two is the power nap, it's really good for alertness and motor performance; and then past the 30 minutes mark you go into a very deep form of sleep called slow wave sleep. Your brain synchronises to a very slow rhythm, your body temperature decreases dramatically, and your blood-flow in your brain gets very slow.

So, all in all, you're kind of in a zombie state and your brain is in a dampened brain state, so to speak. This lasts between 30 and 60 minutes.

Norman Swan: And is that a form of sleep where you're paralysed, effectively?

Sara Mednick: No, that's during REM sleep. So the next 60 to 90 minutes of your 90 minute sleep cycle is where you have REM sleep and REM sleep is where you have paralysis of your body, but you also have very vivid dreams, very fanciful dreams, and you also have these rapid eye movements, and those are the signatures of REM sleep. But your brain is also highly, highly active. It's almost sometimes more active than waking, in fact.

So the way that we do studies is that we manipulate this duration of a sleep cycle by allowing people to only sleep for certain amounts during a nap. So we give them, say, 60-minute naps versus 90-minute naps, and in those 60-minute naps they are not going to have much REM sleep, but in the 90-minute naps they'll have a lot of REM sleep.

So when you want to look for a task such as a creativity task and you think, well REM sleep should be involved with creativity, you should be able to show that by having naps that don't have REM sleep not show creative enhancement, and naps that do show REM sleep having creative enhancement.

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Norman Swan: So essentially you become your own control, because this is the kind of sleep that you have that's the control state.

Sara Mednick: Exactly and so the way we did the study is that we had people doing a creativity task in the morning and then a creativity task in the evening.

Norman Swan: What was the task?

Sara Mednick: The task was called the remote associate's test, if I give you three words — falling, dust and light, can you think of a word that goes with all three of these words.

Norman Swan: Falling, dust and light -- it's hard.

Sara Mednick: Yes, so you want to combine a word that you can actually combine with all three of those words. So, star might be a word -- so falling star, stardust and starlight. These are all words that you can't really combine themselves but there's one word that you can link all three of those words with.

Norman Swan: Of course you can get blocked because you're thinking about it the wrong way.

Sara Mednick: Exactly and you can go for your most obvious association which might be falling rock or something like that, and then you will miss this more remote association which is falling star and the more remote is the one that usually will also go with the other words as well. We're defining creativity as your ability to take disparate ideas and somehow link them together in new and useful ways, something that actually makes sense.

So we have this task where we give people a whole long list of these three word items, and they always have to find this fourth word that goes with these three items. We give them this test in the morning, and we give them the test in the afternoon, and we looked to see if you have no nap, and the no nap condition is people actually sitting very quietly with their eyes closed for 90 minutes with EEG electrodes on their head making sure they don't go to sleep, so they just sit there very quietly.

Norman Swan: So, what, you're going to electrocute them if they fall asleep?

Sara Mednick: No, wouldn't dare...and the other group is the group that has only non REM sleep, so they have stage two, the slow wave sleep, and then the other group has all three stages including REM sleep. And we looked to see what happens to their brain performance or their creativity performance after these different naps. What we found is that the naps with REM sleep showed 40% improvement over the other groups in creativity. This is the first study to really link REM sleep with creativity but also it really shows the power of napping.

Norman Swan: And what's going on in the brain, were you checking anything in the brain while this was happening?

Sara Mednick: We haven't actually done that yet but the idea is that during REM sleep your brain is highly active, but an area of the brain called the hippocampus is actually quite shutdown and the hippocampus is the area of the brain that helps you remember things. When you are in REM sleep if you don't have the hippocampus telling the associative network, which is in the neocortex, this area of the brain that has all of your different associations and all of your different experiences in your brain lodged in this large kind of associative network is the idea.

Norman Swan: Just to explain, '1996' doesn't reside in one spot in your brain it's just there's these huge networks of millions and millions of nerve cells which create '1996' rather than it being in one spot and that's what you're saying with its associative network and then it can reform and it's '1997'.

Sara Mednick: Exactly, so what happens when you go into REM sleep is that this associate network is highly, highly active, but this area of the brain, which is telling you what were your real memories from your past, the hippocampus, is quite dampened. So it's not telling the neocortex how to associate this huge network of ideas that you have in your brain.

Norman Swan: So in a sense you're not rooted in reality?

Sara Mednick: You are very much not rooted in reality. You're free associating. Your brain is in a fairly loose associative state and that allows you to make combinations, new combinations between these things that have never been associated before and that's what we're imagining is what's happening during REM sleep to allow you to have these new creative associations.

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Norman Swan: Did it make any difference whether they remembered the dream that they had?

Sara Mednick: We didn't ask them about dreaming, we're not sure whether this is a dream effect or if it's just a REM effect.

Norman Swan: Because you mentioned earlier that creative people said well ‘I had a dream’ and there are famous ones like, I think, the double helix was a dream and there's another one —I think the benzene ring —where the snake's swallowing its tail, so there are people who do talk about the dreams that they remember. So, you wonder whether that ability to remember your dreams is linked to this.

Sara Mednick: We thought about that afterwards. REM sleep is when you have these dreams and so it's likely that if we were going to find something it would be during REM sleep. But we haven't actually linked the finding of REM sleep to these dreams.

Norman Swan: The other function that people have suggested for REM sleep, what you're suggesting is one function— that problem solving may be related to it, but people talk about REM sleep as being the housekeeping time of night. Do you have any evidence for that?

Sara Mednick: It's funny, I actually consider slow-wave sleep to be a more housekeeping time, only because I have research that looks at the difference between slow-wave sleep and REM sleep, and what we find for slow-wave sleep is that it's this period of time where you're cleaning the desktop.

I have a task that I have people doing throughout the day and it's a very simple visual task. It's called the texture discrimination task, and they're just having to recognise some oriented lines that are flashed very briefly on a screen. And what we find is that if we test people across the day at multiple times their performance deteriorates across the day, they cannot maintain their optimal level of performance.

If we give them a nap with slow-wave sleep they do not show this deterioration, they don't show any learning or enhancement of performance, but they basically show that whatever excess information was in the brain, whatever was interfering with their ability to remain at their top level of performance is cleared away by slow-wave sleep.

And it may be that it's this dampened state of the brain so that new functions do not interfere with whatever was previously being consolidated, or it may be that the resources that you need in order to produce performance at some optimal level may be enhanced during slow wave sleep. It's not clear what's going on but what we find is that slow-wave sleep does seem to be the housekeeping period of sleep and then what follows is REM sleep which is this period where you see what's left after you've done all your housekeeping and then you put that information together in new and interesting combinations.

Norman Swan: And what's the relationship with memory and sleep?

Sara Mednick: Well, that is obviously what I am studying for the rest of my life, so it's a big question, but it appears to be that not all memories require sleep. Obviously, I can tell you my name and you'll remember it ten minutes later.

Norman Swan: Maybe.

Sara Mednick: Maybe — it depends on how well you slept the night before obviously. But there do seem to be some interesting links between sleep and memory and it may be that the more complex memory visual system that needs to combine with auditory systems, and you have ideas that have never been put together, need to be put together. The more complex these ideas are the more you might need a process like sleep to come and intervene. But if I just give you one piece of information to remember, like my name, it's actually pretty easy to hold onto that information. So the consolidation part is where we think that sleep may really be helping us learn.

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Norman Swan: So I presume that you haven't studied the siesta per se, although you created it in the lab?

Sara Mednick: The idea to study napping and siesta came from people's stories about how they loved to sleep in the daytime and how napping made them feel so much better. When I looked at the literature on nocturnal sleep and memory, there was no way that we could defend why a nap would work, because it seemed like you needed to have six to eight hours of nocturnal sleep to show any kinds of memory improvements. And people who took naps woke up from a nap feeling so much better than when they went to sleep.

So that was sort of the impetus to say, well what's going on with these naps that make people feel so good? And then, we were really surprised, when we started doing this research to show that in the tasks that we were looking at. So a visual memory task was what we started with, the same task I just described to you, that people show the same level of improvement from a nap as they did from a full night of sleep. And this nap was one that was right in the middle of the day and it was at this period of time when you're going to have equal amounts of slow wave sleep and REM sleep. And so what we were thinking and what we believe now is that this nap in the middle of the day, which is this natural time for people to have a siesta, it's a time when most people showed decreases in body temperature, decreases in cognition, that it might be a very natural time for us to be sleeping.

Norman Swan: Is there any illumination of insomnia here, because the interesting thing about true insomnia, my understanding, is there's very little reduction in performance. People get wired and they actually perform, it's very hard in laboratory testing to find reductions in performance of people who are not sleeping well.

Sara Mednick: A lot of the time, people with insomnia —their sleep is actually quite similar; there's not that much difference between people with insomnia and people without insomnia.

Norman Swan: It's a perception problem. You're perceiving your sleep to be less?

Sara Mednick: In some cases it looks as though when they're awake at night they're more alert than people who are not saying that they have insomnia. And what happens is that you remember the fact that you have been awake more. In some ways it's interesting because if you look at the hypnotics that help people with insomnia, benzodiazepines, Ambien, these do not actually alter sleep that much. But what they do is that they don't allow you to remember what happened when you were on those drugs and so they wake up and they say 'well I must have slept well', so there is a large psychological component to the insomnia issues.

Norman Swan: And now, you're trying to manipulate, rather than just rely on people having a nap, whether or not you can actually dial up a certain sleep stage?

Sara Mednick: That's right. The idea is that if the current literature is telling us that specific sleep stages will lead to specific kinds of memory improvements if we can pharmacologically enhance those sleep stages, the question that we're asking now in my lab is, can we then see these specific memory enhancements as well that go along with these pharmacological enhancements.

Norman Swan: What medications dial-up certain stages of sleep?

Sara Mednick: The ones that we're looking at now are Ambien, because that is supposed to slightly enhance stage two sleep, but we're having a hard time actually showing that. And the other one is sodium oxybate, which enhances slow-wave sleep. And so, what we're finding then, is that if we can make these naps that have specifically stage two enhancement, slow-wave sleep enhancement and REM enhancement, should we then show these specific enhancements in say stage two sleep would enhance motor memory, slow-wave sleep would enhance a declared verbal memory and REM enhancement may enhance creativity or perceptual learning.

Norman Swan: Sara Mednick of the Department of Psychiatry from the University of California San Diego.

Reference:
Cai DJ et al. REM, not incubation, improves creativity by priming associative networks. PNAS, June 23, 2009;106;25: 10130-10134

Guest
Dr Sara Mednick Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego, USA

Presenter
Norman Swan
Producer
Brigitte Seega