Question: What are the discoveries that have lead up to your current work?

Alex Reid answered on 10 Nov 2018: last edited 10 Nov 2018 4:39 pm

Hi Madster, thanks for the question. I study sleep and memory which has a long history, but the field I work in has really come into its own in the last 30 years or so. Sleep for a long time was just thought to be a state which you needed for rest which, although true in a way, is not a very in depth or useful as an explanation (e.g. you are sleepy because you need rest, and you need to rest because you are sleepy!). Some of the ancient philosophers thousands of years ago started talking about how sleep might help with your memory. For example, a Roman philospher called Quintilian once said: “It is a curious fact, of which the reason is not obvious, that the interval of a single night will greatly increase the strength of the memory.” He was bang on the money, but it was only thousands of years later we began to formally, and scientifically, look at how this works. This has led more modern scientists to link sleep with a series of memory processes collectively known as ‘memory consolidation’. Memory consolidation, as a term, has undergone a few changes over the years. About 100 years ago researchers found that sleep can help make memory become more ‘fixed’ and less resistant to forgetting. This is kind of like candle wax drying, initially memories are vulnerable to interference but over time (and sleep) they can become more ‘solid’ and harder to forget. Later, sleep was found to actually improve memory. This was specifically for a type of memory called ‘motor memory’ which refers to your skills such as riding a bike. Sleep can actually help you get better at tasks like these without the need for further training! Most recently we have also found sleep can help blend and integrate memories with what we already know. As such, over time, and with more discoveries, the term ‘memory consolidation’ now includes quite a few different things including memory fixation, improvement and integration. In terms of sleep itself there have also been a few important discoveries. In particular the finding that your brain in sleep is actually very active and is not ‘resting’ in the traditional sense (i.e. is switched off). For example, one such sleep stage, Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, was first discovered in the 1950s in a rabbit! Human brain activity in this sleep stage looks so similar to what it looks like when you are awake that when it was first discovered it was called ‘paradoxical sleep’. In the last 30 years or so researchers have increasingly linked the brain activity found in the various stages of sleep to different types of memory consolidation. As you can see many discoveries have led up to my research, and this is true in pretty much all areas of science. There is an expression that science is “standing on the shoulders of giants”, and this means that a given scientist is really working from a vast body of research that came before them (the giant).