UNM professor recruits for sleep and memory study
November 9, 2022 - Savannah Peat
It will be a study they’ll hopefully never forget.
UNM Professor and Psychology Clinical Neuroscience Center Director Vincent Clark is heading up new memory research in partnership with Santa Fe company NeuroGeneces, Inc.
Thanks to a combined $300,000 in grants from the National Science Foundation and the Air Force, the two will uncover how a simple 50 millisecond speck of sound will impact memory storage and retrieval.
“During the daytime you experience a lot of events. Things happen and they sit around in your consciousness without anywhere to go until you figure out how to pack them away,” Clark said. “The idea is these brain waves help you to organize and pack recent memories into long term memory
Clark is utilizing NeuroGeneces’s technology involving tone pips. With a band strapped across a participant’s forehead, the tone pips are timed to slow brain waves that organize the memory consolidation process during sleep.
The tone pips are a certain type of noise that sounds like a puff of air. He says over the course of the night, if this pip is presented right before each slow brain wave’s peak, learning and memory retention increases.
“From the time you're born to the time you die, memory is one of the most important things in our lives,” Clark said. “When you're in school, the better your memory is, the better you do. When you're in a job, the better you can learn new things, the farther you go in your career.”
Read more in the UNM Newsroom
