Snooze News - will awaken your curiosity

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In my past newsletter, Making Memories , I reported the startling findings surrounding sleep and the formation of memories:

Memory-enhancing properties of sleep actually depend on the oscillatory amplitude of the stress hormone, norepinephrine (NE)

We know that memory consolidation occurs during sleep. Lessons learned need to be slept on. But what about all that tossing and turning and waking up all night long. That messes up the process, right? No, all that is necessary. Norepinephrine causes you to wake up more than 100 times a night. And that is during perfectly normal sleep.

Micro-arousals are generated in a periodic pattern during NREM sleep, riding on the peak of locus-coeruleus-generated infraslow oscillations of extracellular NE, whereas descending phases of NE oscillations drive spindles. The amplitude of NE oscillations is crucial for shaping sleep micro-architecture related to memory performance: prolonged descent of NE promotes spindle-enriched intermediate state and REM sleep but also associates with awakenings, whereas shorter NE descents uphold NREM sleep and micro-arousals.

As we head into our winter state of torpor, let us look at news about how we actually do snooze.