Need to remember something important? Take a
break. A proper one – no TV or flicking through your phone messages. It seems
that resting in a quiet room for 10 minutes without stimulation can boost our
ability to remember new information.
The effect is particularly strong in people
with amnesia, suggesting that they may not have lost the ability to form new
memories after all.
“A lot
of people think the brain is a muscle that needs to be continually stimulated,
but perhaps that’s not the best way,” says Michaela Dewar at
Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK.
Memory boost
New
memories are fragile. They need to be consolidated before being committed to long-term
storage, a process thought to happen while we sleep. But at least some consolidation may occur while we’re
awake, says Dewar – all you need is a timeout.
In
2012, Dewar’s team showed that having a rest helps a person to remember what
they were told a few minutes earlier. And the effect seems to last. People who
had a 10-minute rest after hearing a story remembered 10 per cent more of it a week
later than those who played a spot-the-difference
game immediately afterwards.
“We dim the lights and ask them to sit in an
empty, quiet room, with no mobile phones,” says Dewar. When asked what they had
been thinking about afterwards, most volunteers said they had let their minds
wander.
Now
Dewar, along with Michael
Craig at the University of Edinburgh and their
colleagues, have found that spatial memories can also be consolidated when we
rest.
Volunteers who rested after exploring a
virtual-reality environment were 10 per cent more accurate at orientating
themselves in relation to virtual landmarks than those who played a game of
spot the difference afterwards.
It’s good to rest
These findings together suggest that simply
resting while we’re awake can give us some of the memory benefits thought to be
confined to sleep.
This
is good news for insomniacs. “As long as you’re reasonably relaxed, you might
still be experiencing some of the memory-consolidation processes that sleep
would normally do,” says Gareth
Gaskell at the University of York in the UK.
The research could have bigger implications
for people with amnesia. When Dewar’s team conducted a memory experiment with
people who had the condition, they saw more striking results. “Most of them
can’t lead a normal life because they can’t remember what they did 10 minutes ago,”
she says – but all showed huge improvements on the memory test when given a
break.
The volunteers were able to recall between 30 and 80 per
cent of a list of words when they rested for 9 minutes. Without a break, eight of the 12 were unable to
remember anything.
“The findings challenge current theories of
memory,” says Dewar. “It is typically assumed that people with amnesia lose the
ability to consolidate memories; they can take in information but it is rapidly
gone.”
Information overload
Dewar thinks that overstimulation may be what
causes memory problems in people with amnesia. “If we try to reduce the amount
of information going in, people with amnesia can form new memories. There is
some spare capacity there that we can tap into,” she says.
“It is very surprising and exciting,” says
Gaskell. “If we can understand how this takes place, we could help people with
amnesia,” he says.
Dewar hopes to investigate whether having
plenty of breaks can help people with amnesia to learn new information, such as
family news or how to navigate a new home. She has reason to be optimistic: the
wife of a man with Alzheimer’s who took part in her study says she has used the
technique to teach her husband the name of his new grandchild.
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