Researchers have long wished to understand the connection between sleep and memory, especially how the brain encodes long-term memories during slow-wave sleep (while discarding others), or the deep sleep that occurs during the initial hours of one’s rest. Recent research sheds fascinating new light on the issue, but to understand how this works, scientists had to literally take brain samples from living people. The results could help us develop technologies that could one day improve our ability to form deep, long memories.
The 45 patients who donated their brains to science had to undergo neurosurgery for preexisting conditions (33 for drug-resistant epilepsy and 12 for brain tumors) and gave prior written consent. Franz Xaver Mittermaier, the first author of a study in the journal Nature Communications that examined those brain samples, told Salon that the patients’ participation was crucial to the scientists’ success.
