Memory and Cognitive Disorders Award to help researchers explore link between sleep, memory

Carmen Westerberg, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Texas State University, has received one of four 2020 Memory and Cognitve Disorders (MCD) Awards from the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience.

Westerberg shares the award with her collaborator, Ken Paller, a professor in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University. The $300,000 MCD grant will support the team's research study, "Does Superior Sleep Physiology Contribute to Superior Memory Function? Implications for Counteracting Forgetting."

The researchers hope to gain insight into the process of forgetting by studying the sleep physiology of people who almost never forget. These individuals, who have a condition called "highly superior autobiographical memory," or HSAM, can effortlessly remember the minute details of every day of their lives with equal clarity, whether it happened last week or 20 years ago. By comparison, most humans can remember the same amount of detail as those with HSAM for some weeks, but beyond that they recall only highly significant moments in detail.

Sleep physiology is proposed as one possible difference between those with HSAM and those without. Sleep is known to play an important role in memory consolidation and a detailed human study of the brain activity during sleep of HSAM and control individuals will record, compare and analyze the patterns of slow oscillations (linked to memory consolidation), sleep spindles (also connected to consolidation, and recorded at high levels in HSAM individuals) and the ways in which they co-occur. 

A second study will feature an easy-to-use headband that will allow subjects to measure both sleep and memory data at home over a one-month period, to determine if enhanced sleep physiology over multiple nights contributes to superior memory. By guiding the reactivation of memories that are not autobiographical in nature with sound cues presented during sleep, the study will help reveal whether enhanced sleep physiology in HSAM individuals can enhance memory for non-autobiographical memories as well. Westerberg and Paller said that learning how highly superior memory works might help uncover patterns in those suffering from degraded memory function caused by afflictions such as Alzheimer's disease. Deeper understanding could give rise to new treatments for those conditions. 

The MCD Awards support innovative research by U.S. scientists who are studying neurological and psychiatric diseases, especially those related to memory and cognition. The awards encourage collaboration between basic and clinical neuroscience to translate laboratory discoveries about the brain and nervous system into diagnoses and therapies to improve human health.

"We are thrilled to select some of the best scientists and their work in the country this year," said Ming Guo, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the awards committee and professor in neurology and pharmacology at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. "These scientists are addressing questions related to how general anesthesia and sleep impact memory, and how memory works at the basic level. Together, we aim to understand the underlying neurobiology of memory and brain disorders that one day will translate into cures of some of the most devastating brain disorders that afflict millions of people in the world."

The awards are inspired by the interests of William L. McKnight, who founded the McKnight Foundation in 1953 and wanted to support research on diseases affecting memory. His daughter, Virginia McKnight Binger, and the McKnight Foundation board established the McKnight neuroscience program in his honor in 1977. 

 For more information, visit www.mcknight.org.