How To Re-Charge Your Brain To Learn Better

According to a new study, your brain’s batteries get juiced back up during the light, dreamless slumber that accounts for up to half of your night’s sleep.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley conducted tests on 44 healthy young adults and found strong evidence that bursts of brain waves called sleep spindles may network between important regions of the brain to clear a path to learning.

They are fast pulses of electricity that are generated during non-rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and can occur up to 1,000 times per night — help to transfer fact-based memories from the brain’s hippocampus to the prefrontal cortex’s “hard drive.”

This enables the hippocampus, which has limited storage space, to take in fresh data, the researchers explained.

“All these pieces of the puzzle tell a consistent and compelling story — that sleep spindles predict learning refinement,” senior author Matthew Walker, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, said in a UC Berkeley news release.

The study team looked at electroencephalogram tests, which measured electrical activity in the brains of nappers. These showed that the more sleep spindles the nappers produced, the more refreshed they appeared for learning. 

In addition, researchers discovered that sleep spindles were linked to brain activity looping between the lobes of the brain that house the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex — both critical areas for memory. The study appears Mar. 8 in the journal Current Biology