Sleep is Vital to Associating Emotion With Memory, Study Finds
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
Sleep is vital to associating emotion with memory, study finds:
U-M [(University of Michigan)] researchers have been studying how memories associated with a specific sensory event are formed and stored in mice. In a study conducted prior to the coronavirus pandemic and recently published in Nature Communications, the researchers examined how a fearful memory formed in relation to a specific visual stimulus.
They found that not only did the neurons activated by the visual stimulus keep more active during subsequent sleep, sleep is vital to their ability to connect the fear memory to the sensory event.
Previous research has shown that regions of the brain that are highly active during intensive learning tend to show more activity during subsequent sleep. But what was unclear was whether this "reactivation" of memories during sleep needs to occur in order to fully store the memory of newly learned material.
"Part of what we wanted to understand was whether there is communication between parts of the brain that are mediating the fear memory and the specific neurons mediating the sensory memory that the fear is being tied to. How do they talk together, and must they do so during sleep? We would really like to know what's facilitating that process of making a new association, like a particular set of neurons, or a particular stage of sleep," said Sara Aton, senior author of the study and a professor in the U-M Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. "But for the longest time, there was really no way to test this experimentally."
Journal Reference:
Brittany C. Clawson, Emily J. Pickup, Amy Ensing, et al. Causal role for sleep-dependent reactivation of learning-activated sensory ensembles for fear memory consolidation [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21471-2)
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