New research in mice shows why sleep can sometimes make you forgetful

Memory errors are always a nuisance, whether on machines, technology devices or on the body itself. Put simply, our body is a complex cellular machine, in which each organ in the body performs specific functions, and the brain can be considered as the central processing unit and ROM, which is responsible for controlling the activities of the rest of the agencies as well as remembering all the information necessary for daily living activities.

Have you ever woken up after a sleep and forgot where you lost your car keys the night before? That's when your 'memory' is having problems. Our first thought when faced with this situation is due to stressful work, insufficient sleep or worse than age and aging. So what is the real reason behind this phenomenon? Do you need to get medical attention and treatment? We will learn together shortly.

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The brain is the center that controls all activities of the body, including memory

Indeed, excessive forgetfulness is a big problem for anyone's life, but forgetting is sometimes necessary, and that's part of the way the brain works. After all, the most important thing is that we have to remember what's important right now, instead of remembering everything. For example, 20 years ago, when mobile phones were not really popular, you always had to remember your phone number, while at the moment, you definitely do not want to spend money on neurons. For too many frequently contacted phone numbers, simply save them to the phone memory. And there is no need to remember the landline number that I used to do for the past because it is no longer needed.

But exactly how the brain forgets memories that have long been unnecessary and not so clear. Recently, an in-depth study conducted by Japanese scientists and published in Science magazine gave a more in-depth look at this complex process.

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Sleep is when the brain performs a "memory wipe" process to remove unimportant information

First, research has actually shown that, in order to remember what really matters, we need to forget less important information, just like you clean up computer memory or your phone. So, just keep the necessary data. This can happen on two levels in the brain, one related to clearing up less important information when we store and consolidate our memories, and one that helps 'block' information. It is less important when we try to search for memories.

New research conducted on mice seems to reveal in detail the secret mechanisms of the "forget" phenomenon in memory storage. The authors argue that the nature of forgetting is due to activation. of the hormone melatonin-concentrating (MCH), specifically located in the hypothalamus, the area of ​​the brain that is closely related to hormone release in general. and MCH neurons are actually involved in the change between the two main sleep cycles: NREM (rapid eye movement sleep phase) to REM (fast moving eye sleep phase). often related to dreams).

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MCH neurons are most active during the REM sleep cycle

Researchers have shown that forgetting occurs only during storage (not when we encode or retrieve memory), and sleep is the time of day when neurons. MCH cleans up the memory in relation to all the clutter our brains have acquired.

This result was obtained by injecting a special chemical into the brain of mice to inhibit MCH nerve cells. Surprisingly, the mice were able to accomplish two specific memory tasks in a better way: Identify new objects and test their ability to control fear (this is related to the link between stimulation and their adverse effects).

In addition, when researchers completely removed MCH nerve cells from mouse brains, their memory improved significantly over the long term. In contrast, if MCH enhances activity, the memory performance of mice will decrease significantly.

From the results, the researchers argue that interfering with the functioning of MCH neurons may be a viable option in the treatment of memory problems.

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Interfering with MCH nerve cell activity can be a way to improve memory performance

This finding, if accurate and validated by other in-depth studies, could lead to a major breakthrough in understanding the underlying mechanisms of memory functioning. The main problem now lies in how we can be absolutely certain that MCH neurons are involved in clearing up unnecessary, separate information rather than doing it. Decreased performance of memory?

Scientists are working on the assumption that MCH neurons, when activated, cause memory loss and this does not bring a positive effect to our memory. However, it should be noted that the above findings do not give much information about the positive role that forgetting plays in memory maintenance. In addition, the cozy study has only been conducted on rats - despite similarities - but generally very different from humans. And it will take a long time for a research to be as risky as the object to be allowed for human trials. In humans, the role of sleep in the overall activity of memory is not really clear, although there has been a lot of research focusing on this topic in the past.

However, the study did an important, fundamental role, which was the first to show that MCH neurons are strongly associated with making memory worse. . This opens up huge possibilities for memory research as well as the ability to cure related diseases, such as improving memory performance by inhibiting several nerve cells.

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The study, titled ' REM sleep-active MCH neurons are involved in forgetting hippocampus-dependent memories ', was conducted by scientists: Shuntaro Izawa, Srikanta Chowdhury, Toh Miyazaki, Yasutaka Mukai, Daisuke Ono, Ryo Inoue, Yu Ohmura, Hiroyuki Mizoguchi, Kazuhiro Kimura, Mitsuhiro Yoshioka, Akira Terao, Thomas S. Kilduff, and Akihiro Yamanaka.