I’m going to give away one of my big book-writing secrets. When I’ve been stuck in a big narrative puzzle while writing a book, I’ve learned the trick is to clear my head and take a nap.
I’ve never really understood exactly how it works, but the sheer number of times I’ve awakened with the solution at hand—even without recalling dreaming about it—tells me there’s something there.
That’s why I was taken by a new study from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital that suggests something similar.
Neuroscientists there found that when people learn a new motor skill, their brains don’t just generally “consolidate” the memory during sleep. Instead, the brain sends targeted bursts of activity called sleep spindles to the exact regions that were engaged during learning.
The stronger those targeted spindles, the better people performed on the task after waking up.
Brief bursts in the right places
The study was published in The Journal of Neuroscience. Eric Dolan reported on it for PsyPost.
Sleep spindles are brief bursts of brain activity—just a second or two—during light non-REM sleep, long known to play a role in memory. But this study suggests they’re far more sophisticated than we thought.
Rather than firing randomly across your brain, these spindles concentrate in the specific cortical areas you used while learning something new.
The researchers recruited 25 healthy adults and had them come in for three separate “nap visits” (my favorite kind of visit).
During one session, participants learned a finger-tapping sequence—repeatedly typing a five-digit number with their left hand, like 4-1-3-2-4, as quickly and accurately as possible.
Then they took a 90-minute nap while the researchers monitored their brain activity using both EEG and magnetoencephalography (MEG)—two complementary imaging techniques that together can pinpoint exactly where sleep spindles fire.
A few hours later, the participants were tested again on the same finger-tapping task.
Two different kinds of improvement
About 18 percent of brain regions active during learning showed increased spindle activity during the nap. Only 3 percent of regions outside that network did.
These areas included the primary motor cortex (where hand movements are controlled), motor planning regions, and supplementary motor areas.
The study also found that learning during practice and improvement after sleep involved completely different brain regions.
When people initially learned the task, spindle increases correlated with activity in motor execution areas—the parts of the brain that control your hand movements. But improvements measured after the nap correlated with spindle activity in motor planning regions, like the supplementary motor area and premotor cortex.
The two sets of regions didn’t overlap at all.
Study lead Martin Sjøgård, a postdoctoral fellow at the MGH Martinos Center and Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues suggest this means your brain is doing two different jobs.
During initial learning, it’s encoding the memory.
During sleep, it’s consolidating and refining it—making the skill more automatic and less dependent on conscious attention.
Not just about finger tapping
The researchers note that because sleep spindles are measurable and can potentially be enhanced through noninvasive brain stimulation, this work might eventually lead to new treatments to boost learning—especially in people with neurodevelopmental disorders where spindles are often deficient.
And while this study focused on motor skills, as Dolan notes in PsyPost: “the authors suggest that similar principles may apply. If other types of learning also recruit spindles in specific cortical regions, then tracking these changes could provide a sensitive marker of how well the brain is consolidating new information.”
Regardless, it’s useful to understand how and why your brain processes learning and memory while you sleep, even if the specific application here is different from the kind of problems I’m usually trying to solve.
I wonder how many naps they took while writing this study.
7 other things
After refusing to convene the U.S. House for eight weeks during the government shutdown, Speaker Mike Johnson is recalling lawmakers back into session. First up: the fight over whether to call for the release of the the Jeffrey Epstein files. (PBS)
Notwithstanding the end of the shutdown, the Supreme Court extended a temporary order allowing the Trump administration to avoid paying the full Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for the month of November. The new action keeps the stay in place through 11:59 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 13. (Fox News)
According to Billboard’s “Country Digital Song Sales” chart, the No. 1 song in the U.S. is “Walk My Walk” by Breaking Rust—an artist that was created by artificial intelligence (AI). It marks the first time an AI-created song has reached the top of the charts. (Newsweek)
Hundreds of applications have now been submitted since an anonymous family in England published an advertisment for a £180k-a-year tutor ($237,000 U.S.) for their one-year old son -- someone to “support [our] youngest child on his first steps to becoming an English gentleman.” In the family’s minds, the head of a tutor search firm helping them explained, it’s all about British class structure, and how the right accents and hobbies can lead to success and open doors. “The family know this may not work, but they’ve just taken the view of, ‘let’s give it a go and let’s go as early as we can’, because the cost of it is not relevant,” he said. (BBC)
Bloated by excessive investment, distorted by government intervention, and plagued by heavy losses, China’s electric vehicle industry appears destined for a crash. (The Atlantic)
Two people who laundered over £5.5billion worth of Bitcoin have been jailed for a total of 15 years. Malaysian national Hok Seng Ling, 47, pleaded guilty at London’s Southwark Crown Court to entering into a money laundering arrangement. His accomplice, Chinese national Zhimin Qian, 47, also admitted to money laundering, which gave her the title ‘Goddess of Wealth’, due to her lavish lifestyle. (Metro UK)
In the Wake of the Edmund Fitzgerald: The mighty ship, immortalized in song by Gordon Lightfoot, sank 50 years ago on Lake Superior. Our reporter spent a week on a Great Lakes freighter that survived the storm. (NYT)
Thanks for reading. Photo by Adrian Swancar on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this Inc.com. See you in the comments!
RE 7 Other Things:
It boggles my mind that SCOTUS can be so cruel - particularly to the mothers and children - that rely on SNAP. Let’s also remember all the businesses that are part of the economic circle of life.
It would be interesting to understand the full economic impact including the continued cost to keep pleading with SCOTUS. I also wonder about the ROI on the $40 BB given to Argentina, cash the administration conveniently was able to find, not to mention the idea of giving everyone $2,000 from the tariff taxes that could have funded SNAP. Sigh…
I hope they can find a way to extend this to other learning, like languages. I never had trouble learning to play an instrument, or learning a skill that involved using my hands, but languages always caused me trouble. I took Italian for 6 years, and was never proficient. Even around Italian speaking family. I could understand what they said but could never respond. It would be great to use one of those apps, go through a lesson, take a nap, do the next lesson, take a nap, and so on.