Sleep May Enhance Motor Recovery during Rehabilitation
Agustin Benjamin Ezequiel Solano, Gonzalo Lerner, Guillermina Griffa, Alvaro Deleglise, Pedro Caffaro et al.
(see article e0325242024)
Sleep enhances how well we retain autobiographical memories, such as a pleasant memory of riding your bike with a friend. But its role in how well we retain unconscious memories, like the act of riding a bike, is disputed. In this issue, Solano et al. investigated how sleep contributes to an aspect of motor skill learning called sensorimotor adaptation. This is the ability to perform motor skills in changing environmental and internal conditions. Referring to the bike example, sensorimotor adaptation enables you to ride someone else's bike without having to reacquire the skill.
Using a cohort of nearly 300 people, the authors discovered that when sleep occurred shortly after motor training, long-term memory was enhanced by 30%. This was linked to specific neural markers of long-term memory formation associated with sleep that are typically linked to autobiographical memory enhancement. These findings support the existence of common mechanisms across memory domains and suggest that aligning training sessions with sleep may improve motor recovery in rehabilitation programs.
Learning from memory reactivation was associated with increased bilateral intra-parietal sulcus activity and diminished default mode network activity. See Kondat et al. for more information.
A Unique Pathway in the Brain Enhances Visual Learning
Taly Kondat, Niv Tik, Hagai Sharon, Ido Tavor, and Nitzan Censor
(see article e0301242024)
Reading and writing, picking up and moving objects, and navigating the world are all known as visual skills because when people with intact eyesight perform them, they integrate visual information with their movements. Learning visual skills takes much practice and time, but Kondat and colleagues have uncovered a neural mechanism that improves how quickly we learn visual skills. Participants in this investigation learned visual skills much quicker when trained in a way that reactivated visual memories of the task. These behavioral changes were associated with distinct brain activity as compared to other methods of task learning, including increased engagement of cognitive and attentional brain regions. In daily life, these findings may inform new strategies to help improve our learning efficiency, even in contexts beyond visual learning. These findings are also informative clinically, as this neural mechanism may be targeted to improve learning efficiency in those who are relearning skills following brain damage.
Footnotes
This Week in The Journal was written by Paige McKeon
