An experiment with sleep and improvised drugs that restore memories
If you deprive a person of sleep, then his brain will become increasingly worse at storing new memories. This sleep experiment proved that it is possible to restore memory using drugs for asthma and erectile dysfunction. The study suggests that memories are hidden rather than lost. And there is a working way to restore them.
Erectile dysfunction drugs have much greater potential. Their task is to dilate blood vessels, which is important for blood circulation not only “there” but also in the heart and brain. And it is precisely the use of non-obvious drugs with benefit and result that is known as biohacking.
What is the new sleep experiment based on?
Almost everyone knows how lack of sleep harms the brain. Research has shown that only one night without sleep increases the amount of amyloid beta peptides associated with Alzheimer's disease. In addition to causing a person to lose concentration, lack of sleep negatively affects the hippocampus, which plays a key role in creating memories.
The foundation of the idea
In the new researchpresented this month at Forum of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) In Vienna, researchers have identified a new role for existing drugs that can restore memories thought to have been lost due to sleep deprivation.
By manipulating mechanisms specifically in the hippocampus, we were able to make memory processes resistant to the negative effects of sleepless nights. In a sleep experiment, we found out whether amnesia could be reversed even several days after the initial learning and a period of sleep deprivation.
Robbert Havekes, professor of neurobiology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
The hippocampus acts as a librarian in the brain. It organizes short-term memories, which are combined into long-term memories, labeled and stored for later use. Its role extends to both spatial and social memory. And everything that can improve this process can be considered nootropic.
Types of memory and working with them
Spatial memory is our short-term and long-term memory of places, events, and things in the world. It's how we remember our way to the grocery store and how we find things after we put them down.
Social memory allows us to distinguish a familiar face from an unfamiliar one, thanks to which we can not only enter into long-term relationships with a partner, but also respond to people based on previous encounters with these recent acquaintances.
Focusing on social memory, the researchers gave mice a choice: interact with their siblings or with a mouse they had never met before. Typically, the mice would choose to interact with the unknown mouse over their siblings, and then the next day they would spend an equal amount of time with their siblings and the newly encountered mouse, which was now considered familiar.
However, a sleep experiment showed that mice that were sleep deprived after their first encounter with an unknown mouse interacted with it the next day as if it were the first day of their encounter, suggesting that the first encounter had been forgotten.
How a sleep experiment revealed clues to memory
It is proposed that new experiences activate a population of neurons that undergo permanent chemical and/or physical changes and become an “engram” or memory trace. Reactivation of the engram results in the restoration of the memory. In contrast, another way of remembering is built around reinforcement learning, using a bundle dopamine and norepinephrine.
Remember all
At this stage, the researchers used optical fibres to activate specific neurons with light pulses. In doing so, the scientists identified the neurons that formed a specific memory of the encounter between the mice.
Using light, the scientists reactivated the engram, restoring the mice's latent social memory of their first encounter. In parallel, the scientists found that roflumilast, which is known as Daxas, Daliresp, used to reduce irritation and swelling of the airways in severe asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), produces the same social memory-restoring effect.
The researchers conducted a parallel experiment with SNM to study spatial memory. Mice that were sleep deprived were unable to remember the location of individual objects. They did not notice that the object moved to a new location during testing. As with social memory, latent spatial memory has been restored with the drug vardenafil (Levitra and others), used to treat erectile dysfunction or impotence.
Research result
We have been able to show that sleep deprivation leads to amnesia for spatial and social activities. This amnesia can be reversed even several days after the initial experience and episode of sleep deprivation using drugs already approved for human use. We now want to focus on understanding what processes underlie these accessible and inaccessible memories. In the long term, we hope that these studies will help pave the way for reversing forgetting by restoring access to information in the brain that is inaccessible by conventional means.
Robbert Havekes, professor of neurobiology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Breakthrough therapy, along with the ability to test combinations of different drugs, offers room for development. We talk about its boundaries in telegram channel materials. Subscribe so you don't miss the latest articles!
