Sleep Flashcards

Question

Insomnia

Answer 1

* Disorder not due to a substance or known physiological condition * 30% of population report one or more of the symptoms of insomnia but only 10% fulfil diagnostic criteria * Causes: * Overactive thyroid * Mental or physical health * Medication * Stress * Environmental factors

Answer 2

* Group of sleep disorders that involve unwanted events or experiences that occur while you are falling asleep, sleeping or waking up * May include abnormal movements, behaviours, emotions, perceptions or dreams * You remain asleep during the event and often have no memory that it occurred * Sleep walking * Night terrors * Restless leg syndrome * Periodic limb movements * Sexsomnia * Sleep-related eating disorder * REM sleep behaviour disorder

Answer 3

* Sleep paralysis is absent * Most patients are male * Descending activity from brain to muscles usually blocked by pons * Pons lesioned → REM behaviour disorder * Can also be related to some other conditions (e.g., Parkinson’s) * Treatment: benzodiazepines or melatonin

Answer 4

* Muscles and soft tissues in the throat relax and collapse sufficiently to cause a blockage of the airway * Oxygen level in your blood drops * Brain disturbs sleeps → waken to resume breathing * Often don’t remember awakenings * Causes: * Commonly associated with weight * Lifestyle: alcohol, smoking, medicines * Having a large neck/ unusual neck structure * Correlation with: Gender (male), Age (40+), Menopause

Answer 5

* Different from voluntary or imposed shift in timing of sleep (e.g., shift work; jet lag) * Seen in blind people, also co-morbid with ADHD, depression or neurodegenerative disease * Altered or disrupted sensitivity to external cues * Delayed sleep phase disorder * Advanced sleep phase disorder * Difficultly in diagnosable disorder vs. subclinical tendencies * Individual differences in tolerance of disparities in circadian synchronisation * Treatment involves light exposure/ melatonin

Answer 6

* Narcolepsy is a long-term neurological disorder that involves a decreased ability to regulate sleep-wake cycles. * Symptoms often include periods of excessive daytime sleepiness and brief involuntary sleep episodes. * About 70% of those affected also experience episodes of sudden loss of muscle strength, known as cataplexy. * Caused by significantly less hypocretin than normal (Thannickal et al., 2000)

Answer 7

1. **Wish fulfilment** (Freud) * Unconscious way to express sexual and aggressive fantasies 2. **Physiological function theory**: promote neural development and preserve neural pathways by providing the brain with stimulation 3. **Activation – Synthesis Model** (Hobson & McCarley) * Dreams are products of brain neuron activity in the visual cortex, memory areas, and emotion areas. * No external stimulus; so brain tries to make sense of neuron activity = content of a “dream” * Explains randomness of dreams * Prefrontal cortex shuts down during REM so you have fewer inhibitions and don’t question illogical parts of dreams

Answer 8

* **Restoration** (Moruzzi, 1972; Vyazovskiy & Harris, 2013) * Clearance of toxic waste products twice as fast during sleep than wake (Xie et al., 2013) * Slow oscillations à short period of rest for all neurons * **Adaptation** (keep us out of trouble! – Meddis, 1975; Seigel, 2009) * Sleep follows our biology: we don’t see well at night, we are most vulnerable at night * Saves energy * Allows awakening when needed * **Cognitively beneficial** (Walker, 2009) e.g., emotion regulation * Strips memories of emotional tone, non-emotional aspects are strengthened * **Retention and consolidation of learnt material** (e.g., Born, Stickgold, etc.)

Answer 9

* Place cells in the hippocampus code spatial relations * Place cells are activated in the same order during sleep as during exploring a maze * Rats “dream” running through the maze

Answer 10

* Declarative memory: factual informaiton recall e.g. capitals * Procedural memory: learning motor sequences e.g. how to ride a bike

Answer 11

* Experiment demonstrating link between sleep and learning * Learning and forgetting nonsense syllables * After a certain time, forgetfullness would stabilise. This would be after sleep. So sleep helps us to stop forgetfulness

Answer 12

* **Plihal & Born, 1997** * Used standard procedural and declarative memory tasks: mirror tracing and paired associate learning * Exploited the fact that early sleep is SWS-rich, and late sleep is REM-rich * 4 groups (sleep/wake), early/late retention interval * For early retention interval, sleep benefits declarative but not procedural memory (SWS?) * For late retention interval, sleep benefits procedural but not declarative memory (REM?)

Answer 13

* **Rudoy et al., 2009** * Participants had to learn 50 object locations on a board and an auditory cue would be played at the same time * They would then have a nap and half of the participants would hear the cue in their sleep and some did not * The change in spatial recall was significantly stronger for the cued participants

Answer 14

* Presentation of a cue (odour) associated with memory trace during SWS increased consolidation of this memory content * This didn’t work during REM * Also didn’t generalise to procedural memory * fMRI scans showed that the hippocampus would activate more during sleep to the odours that had been presented while awake

Answer 15

* **Mednick et al., 2003** * Short naps improve performance * BUT ONLY, if REM-sleep was present * similar effects of a short nap and a whole night‘s sleep

Answer 16

* **Dewar et al., 2012** * Story learning task * Taking a break and doing nothing was shown to improve recall even a week later * Limitation: wakeful rest and sleeping isn't the same → lots of confounds

Answer 17

* **Gais et. al, 2006** * Vocabulary (German) learning and sleep study * Time of learning impacted the forgetting % - students seem to remember better when they learn in the evening * Sleep deprivation increased the forgetting %

Sleep Flashcards

(41 cards)