
Older Adults' Forgetfulness Tied to Faulty Brain Rhythms in Sleep - jaytaylor
http://npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/12/18/571120472/older-adults-forgetfulness-tied-to-faulty-brain-rhythms-in-sleep
======
chiefalchemist
Sleep allows the brain to catch up on the day's events. That is, it buffers
certain things to be processed in full later. Disrupt that process - e.g., not
enough sleep, alcohol (as a REM sleep disruptor) - and memory will go
sideways.

I'd be interested in knowing how many of the prescription drugs common among
older adults have REM disruption as a side-effect. I wonder if that's even
tested for. Perhaps we're managing one set of ills only to create another?

~~~
albertgoeswoof
> Sleep allows the brain to catch up on the day's events. That is, it buffers
> certain things to be processed in full later

Citation?

I didn't know there was a proven reason why we sleep...?

~~~
bduerst
Here's a good review that came out not too long ago:

>Specifically, newer findings characterize sleep as a brain state optimizing
memory consolidation, in opposition to the waking brain being optimized for
encoding of memories.

[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9ac5/c749244b9e2509a670a816...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9ac5/c749244b9e2509a670a8168507d4f07b1858.pdf)
[pdf]

~~~
zaptheimpaler
<clever analogy to some CS concept. life is a computer. human is a machine.
brain is a program. all is binary. 0010100101. why does the treadmill speed up
the harder i run?>

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j79
Ah, I'll have to share this with my wife! We welcomed our first child in
November. Since then, we've been pretty sleep deprived thanks to the nightly
feedings and diaper changes. Both of us were remarking this morning how
forgetful we had become, even to the point that we couldn't recall how the
night had gone.

~~~
whafro
Since having a kid myself, I've pretty much settled on the notion that it's an
evolutionary trick: since you don't sleep much, you don't remember the hellish
times during those early months (years?), so you're willing to have a second –
or third, or fourth – kid down the road.

~~~
aerophilic
Ha! Funny but makes sense, though I think in this case it is a by product of
our young forcing us to “pay attention” to them. The thing I always found more
interesting is how babies tend to look more like their fathers than mothers at
birth. The evolutionary advantage being to make it more obvious “who’s kid it
is”. It is fairly easy to know the mother, but harder to “prove” the father,
at least evolutionary speaking.

~~~
wincy
The young aren’t forcing you to “pay attention” to them, they just want their
needs met. One of those needs is to not be eaten by snakes or other predators,
so they don’t want to be alone. How people ever came up with the idea that
putting a helpless baby in a different room was a good idea or even preferable
to just cosleeping is beyond me.

~~~
skc
Presumably it's a good idea because there is now no risk of them being eaten
by snakes or other predators.

Are we supposed to stop adapting to our environment?

~~~
memebox3v
But they dont know that. And the stress they experience as a result is
potentially damaging to a developing brain.

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trendia
From the paper, it looks like the area involved is the medial pre-frontal
cortex (mPFC). Give mPFC's role in memory, my initial suspicion is that the
brain rhythms are a symptom, and not a cause, of memory loss. That means that
fixing the brain rhythms might not fix the underlying memory problems.

It's also worthy to note that moderate exercise can improve connectivity of
the mPFC, so that is at least one way to avoid these troubles.

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27182818284
One of the more fascinating parts to me was how little it took:

"If you're like 50 milliseconds too early, 50 milliseconds too late, then the
storing mechanism actually doesn't work."

~~~
hathawsh
Fascinating indeed. That's not very different from the timing of common music.
Could it be that our appreciation of music is somehow related to the way our
brains work?

~~~
stevemk14ebr
I think music's appeal is related to the rythmns of heartbeats. Logic being
you find comfort in being close to another human, an advantage to be in pairs.
Therefore the brain is hardwired to prefer rythmns around that pace.

Just my theory though

~~~
fuzzfactor
One of the most popular recordings of the 20th century was basically in tempo
with the resting human heart, with just that intro.

"The Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd

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dreamdu5t
Best thing I did for my sleep and my life was quit drinking alcohol and
caffeine. I feel like I sleep twice as good and feel twice as better
throughout the day. No exaggeration. But the social pressure to use these
drugs is intense, as most of the population is addicted to some degree.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Both alcohol and caffeine get related to health benefits in the popular press
(including science press).

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undoware
Quite by accident, I've discovered that taking a microdose amount of the
antipsychotic (!!) seroquel/quetiapine dramatically improves sleep quality and
amount. I use about half a 25mg pill every night. You have vivid, happy (no,
really) dreams, and you sleep like the dead for 8h. In fact, the depth of
sleep is the only drawback, IMO, as you can't take it if you're late to bed,
or you will miss work.

A moderate dose of seroquel for actual psychosis would be like 400mg, and a
typical off-brand use for sleep would be like 100mg, which is what my partner
was on when I decided to take one of her pills (with her consent) and see what
was up. I can't recommend higher than 25mg, however.

A nice indica also helps, in my experience.

It wouldn't surprise me if bedtime use of both these things are discovered to
protect memory in older adults.

~~~
hyperdunc
If you frequently use indica to help sleep, you'll find it even harder to
sleep without.

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ChuckMcM
They outline the experiment they need to run, every participant gets a neuro
hat but neither the participants or investigators know if the participant got
a 'sync the waves' hat or a 'disrupt the waves' hat. Then look at the results
and unblind the hat choices.

EDIT: From the article -- _" But the study also suggests that it's possible to
improve an impaired memory by re-synchronizing brain rhythms during sleep.

One way to do this would be by applying electrical or magnetic pulses through
the scalp. "The idea is to boost those brain waves and bring them back
together," Helfrich says.

Walker already has plans to test this approach to synchronizing brain waves."_

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SpikeDad
Oh geez. Wondering why my sleep quality has diminished as I got older and my
memory, um... Forgot what I was going to say. 8-(

~~~
placeholderNam
Haha, your choice in emoji gives away your age in any case.

~~~
TimTheTinker
Note that HN doesn’t support Unicode in comments, so plaintext emojis are the
only option.

~~~
Malice
The point might have been that with access to emojis (on other platforms)
youngsters no longer use the oldschool emojis. Use of oldschool emojis
strongly suggests oldschool poster :)

~~~
TimTheTinker
Use of the word "emoticon" instead of "emoji" would also be a strong indicator
:)

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jalopy
So does anyone have recommendations on how to improve brainwave coordination
and reverse the symptoms indicated in the article? Any tips, techniques,
practices, other than avoiding alcohol/caffeine?

~~~
lhuser123
I would recommend the book “Make your brain smarter “ by Sandra Bond Chapman.

~~~
_audakel
Any good tl;dr's?

~~~
ysr23
not read it, but i'm guessing her tedx is a tl;dr?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh8el8m9mLM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh8el8m9mLM)

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aantix
Is it me, or do a lot of older people snore? Is there some sort of muscle that
relaxes in the throat that as we age, causes that?

And if that's the case, is a simple CPAP part of the solution to this issue?

~~~
TheDauthi
Assuming we're really talking about sleep apnea, which snoring is a symptom
of, and does affect your sleep in some really nasty ways. The prevalence of
memory problems goes beyond what apnea would cover.

Let's talk stats for a second:

There's a buildup of fatty tissue as you age. The soft palate changes in
shape, and you're more likely to gain weight. Weight is the largest component,
gender is secondary, and age is tertiary. Interestingly, while sleep apnea is
more likely to occur as you age, the severity goes down.

Incidence in male population goes to about 20% after the age of 75. For women,
it's a bit over 10 - though that's just an estimate because women show
symptoms at a different rate.

I somewhat wish apnea was the cause, for selfish reasons. There would be more
drive to improve the machines, and as a bonus, these people could start
getting treated.

~~~
verulito
There's also skeletal changes with age: the facial skeleton shrinks starting
in our 40s-50s.

Got a reference for severity claim? That measured in terms of AHI or
significance of the events?

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kingmanaz
Not sure if any here have tried it, but would looping a recording of
isochronic delta-wave tones during sleep help sync brain rhythms?

~~~
l33tbro
This was my thought too. I use these nightly and sleep like a baby. I'd argue
that it's also past the point of being a placebo, as I have done this for over
a year and have only found a couple of tones that are actually effective. This
is the current favorite:

[https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/isochronicBrainwaveGenerat...](https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/isochronicBrainwaveGenerator.php)

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harshaw
I wonder if this is at all related to the idea of interactive metronome
therapy. See [https://www.interactivemetronome.com/what-is-
im](https://www.interactivemetronome.com/what-is-im)

Im seems to be about improving "Neurotiming".

------
lolc
Looks like I'm going to be the guy to shout "correlation is not causation"
today.

What if older brains decide to filter more, store less and this is reflected
in the brainwave patterns? A young brain might go "accept accept accept
accept...." whereas an older brain might go "accept reject reject accept
reject...". I'm pretty happy about having forgotten a lot of stuff.

After all, the older you get, the more you have to throw out to accommodate
new memories. And it's mostly trash. So why remember it over sweet youth?

~~~
InclinedPlane
We're talking specifically about people forgetting things that they want to
remember, I don't think your hypothesis applies.

~~~
sitkack
It might be harder for older brains to forget the right stuff.

Wanting to remember something and remembering something isn't as much of a
conscious choice as we would like.

I have noticed that my recall speed is exponential in the quality of sleep and
exercise. If I work out, have a great sleep (post exercise sauna), I am
_sharp_. If I trash myself, I have a noticeable 500ms+ access latency. Not for
concepts, but for words. Words always take longer.

------
sabujp
so basically proving the old adage that it's hard to teach an old dog new
tricks ..but maybe we can get around this by wearing electrodes on our heads
to fix this as we get older, one can only hope.

------
leggomylibro
I've been wondering about this lately. Honestly, and it kind of pains me to
say this, I'm coming to the conclusion that alcohol is Bad.

Hey, quit laughing - I don't think that it is necessarily unhealthy to try and
smooth out some of the bumps along life's road, but there have got to be
better ways. And don't say, 'exercise.'

The cognitive hits of alcohol are just looking like they're too long term. Not
even over a lifetime, but over a week. With all the information coming in
about how it messes with our REM cycles and potentially inhibits learning that
took place over the past day or two from sticking to your brain...I dunno.

What is the point of dropping your day's problems on the floor in the evening
if doing so prevents you from learning or benefiting from the experience?

Edit: By which I mean, alcohol seems to cause a lot of issues around what your
brain does while it sleeps, which seems to be what this article is calling out
as a problem that can be exacerbated with age. Sorry, I guess I kind of jumped
between topics there...

~~~
jghn
I recently got an apple watch and along the way installed a sleep tracking
app. I was skeptical of its accuracy until I realized that I could identify
the nights I'd been drinking with 100% accuracy as those nights the tracker
didn't seem to think I slept hardly at all. I always knew I'd be tired the
next day but this was eye opening.

~~~
ProAm
This is because alcohol is an anesthetic. And the human body will tend to wake
up after an anesthetic wears off. I believe the anesthetic properties of
alcohol lasts roughly 4 hours, so if you sleep you'll probably begin to stir
and wake up 4 hours after your last drink. Very similar to surgery patients
who naturally wake up after the anesthetic used for surgery wears off.

~~~
damontal
4 hours for me like clockwork after a few drinks before bed.

~~~
wasx
This is crazy but I'm pretty similar, is this a documented effect that I could
read more about?

Almost always after a night of heavy drinking I wake from anywhere between 5am
- 8am and have a rough time getting back to sleep for at least a few hours.
Knowing my drinking patterns, those times would tend to correlate to about 4
hours earlier passing out.

~~~
Tiksi
This happens to many people in around the same timeframe, I'm pretty sure it's
due to GABA rebound [https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/mind-
read/alcohol_sleep...](https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/mind-
read/alcohol_sleep_and_why_you)

From what I recall, alcohol binds to GABA receptors, GABA builds up in the
body, eventually metabolizes to glutamate which takes a few hours depending on
how much you drink, but seems to be around half a night's sleep. The glutamate
wakes you up and gives you energy, hence the strange "feeling great after a
night of drinking on no sleep" thing.

