Summary: Targeted transcranial electrical stimulation during short-wave sleep can boost episodic memory by almost 20%.
Source: HRL Laboratories
HRL Laboratories, LLC, researchers have published results showing that targeted transcranial electrical stimulation during slow-wave sleep can improve metamemories of specific episodes by nearly 20% after only one viewing of the episode, compared to controls. Metamemory describes the sensitivity of whether memories are recalled accurately or not, such as during eyewitness testimony.
Unique patterns of transcranial electrical stimulation can be cued during the sleep phase called slow-wave sleep to boost consolidation of new memories into the brain’s permanent long-term memory. Known as spatiotemporal amplitude-modulated patterns or STAMPS, these stimulation patterns can be targeted to affect particular memories. In immersive virtual reality experiments, one-minute episodes were first paired with arbitrary STAMPs once during viewing. With subsequent stimulation during sleep, targeted memories were measurably improved after just one viewing. Before this study, general belief was that targeting individual naturalistic memories would require invasive interventions at the single neuron scale in the hippocampus.
“Our results suggest that, unlike relatively localized brain circuits responsible for regulating mood and movement, episodic memories are processed by a much more widespread network of brain areas,” said HRL principal investigator and lead author Praveen Pilly. “We believe our study will pave the way for next-generation transcranial brain-machine interfaces that can boost learning and memory in healthy humans for real-world tasks, such as language attainment or piloting skills. Such a non-invasive approach can also potentially benefit a majority of patients with learning and memory deficits at much lower cost and risk than required for implanting intracranial electrode arrays. It could also be possible to enhance the efficacy of exposure behavioral therapy with immersive virtual reality using STAMP-based tagging and cueing for the treatment of PTSD.”
Funding: The research was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and the Army Research Office as part of the RAM Replay Program.
Source:
HRL Laboratories
Media Contacts:
Michele Durant – HRL Laboratories
Image Source:
The image is in the public domain.
Original Research: Open access
“One-Shot Tagging During Wake and Cueing During Sleep With Spatiotemporal Patterns of Transcranial Electrical Stimulation Can Boost Long-Term Metamemory of Individual Episodes in Humans”. Praveen Pilly et al.
Frontiers in Neuroscience doi:10.3389/fnins.2019.01416.
Abstract
One-Shot Tagging During Wake and Cueing During Sleep With Spatiotemporal Patterns of Transcranial Electrical Stimulation Can Boost Long-Term Metamemory of Individual Episodes in Humans
Targeted memory reactivation (TMR) during slow-wave oscillations (SWOs) in sleep has been demonstrated with sensory cues to achieve about 5–12% improvement in post-nap memory performance on simple laboratory tasks. But prior work has not yet addressed the one-shot aspect of episodic memory acquisition, or dealt with the presence of interference from ambient environmental cues in real-world settings. Further, TMR with sensory cues may not be scalable to the multitude of experiences over one’s lifetime. We designed a novel non-invasive non-sensory paradigm that tags one-shot experiences of minute-long naturalistic episodes in immersive virtual reality (VR) with unique spatiotemporal amplitude-modulated patterns (STAMPs) of transcranial electrical stimulation (tES). In particular, we demonstrated that these STAMPs can be re-applied as brief pulses during SWOs in sleep to achieve about 10–20% improvement in the metamemory of targeted episodes compared to the control episodes at 48 hours after initial viewing. We found that STAMPs can not only facilitate but also impair metamemory for the targeted episodes based on an interaction between pre-sleep metamemory and the number of STAMP applications during sleep. Overnight metamemory improvements were mediated by spectral power increases following the offset of STAMPs in the slow-spindle band (8–12 Hz) for left temporal areas in the scalp electroencephalography (EEG) during sleep. These results prescribe an optimal strategy to leverage STAMPs for boosting metamemory and suggest that real-world episodic memories can be modulated in a targeted manner even with coarser, non-invasive spatiotemporal stimulation.
