The role of sleep in brain development

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Marcos Frank, PhD, associate professor of Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, will present information on early brain development and the importance of sleep during early life when the brain is rapidly maturing and highly changeable.

Building on his research that the brain during sleep is fundamentally different from the brain during wakefulness, Dr. Frank has found that cellular changes in the sleeping brain that may promote the formation of memories. “This is the first real direct insight into how the brain, on a cellular level, changes the strength of its connections during sleep,” Frank says.

When an animal goes to sleep it’s like a switch is thrown, everything is turned on that’s necessary for making synaptic changes that form the basis of memory formation. The team used an animal model of cortical plasticity – the making and breaking of neural connections in response to life experiences. 

They found that once the brain is triggered to reorganize its neural networks in wakefulness (by visual deprivation, for instance), intra- and intercellular communication pathways engage, setting a series of enzymes into action within the reorganizing neurons during sleep. The key cellular player in this process is a molecule called N-methyl D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR), which acts like a combination listening post and gate-keeper. It both receives extracellular signals in the form of glutamate and regulates the flow of calcium ions into cells.

“As soon as the animal had a chance to sleep, we saw all the machinery of memory start to engage.” Frank will discuss recent experiments and how these relate to memory formation at the molecular level, why humans need sleep, and why they are so affected by the lack of it.

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Contact: Karen Kreeger
karen.kreeger@uphs.upenn.edu
215-459-0544
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

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I do agree with you. Few years back, I have read in an article that says during in our sleep, our brain will still remain function and helps us to solve problems that you have just encountered before going to bed. My kids were doing badly on their math, so I have told them to study 15 to 30 minutes their math just before going to bed and their math have improve tremendously. My elder one even won the top award for maths last year in his school.

posted by Rick Goh on 03/23/2010 at 8:29 am -08:00