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Sleep won’t help elderly remember
Reduced quality of rest with age erases memory benefits
By Tina Hesman Saey
For young people, snoozing means big
gains in memory. But in older folks some
of sleep’s memory-boosting abilities are
erased, a new study finds.
Sleep has been shown in a wide
variety of studies to increase people’s
ability to recall words and objects and to
improve physical skills. But that boost
may be available only to the young, Lauri
Kurdziel and Rebecca Spencer of the
University of Massachusetts Amherst
reported November 13.
Previously, the researchers had shown
that a night of sleep improved young
people’s ability to learn a series of but-
ton presses similar to playing a piano.
Adults in the over-50 age group didn’t
get a bump in performance from sleep-
ing. But that difference may have been
due to older folks’ slower reaction times.
Cats look to the edge
cats may not seem like planners, but
they do look ahead when walking.
Three adult cats with magnetic devices
strapped to their heads walked across
slats, giving scientists the first data on
where cats look when they walk. The
cats looked a few rungs ahead, focusing on the edges of the slats, found
Trevor Rivers, now at Bowdoin college
in Brunswick, Maine. “They don’t say
‘I want to step right there.’ They are
looking at where not to be,” Rivers said
november 14. — Tina Hesman Saey
Moms protected from stress
new mothers might not believe it, but
being a mom may help protect against
some negative consequences of
stress. Tracey Shors of Rutgers university in Piscataway, n.j., and colleagues
tested the effect of stress on female
rats’ ability to learn to blink when they
hear a particular sound. Stress ren-
ders virgin female rats incapable of
learning the task. But mothers, includ-
ing virgin female foster mothers, are
protected against learning deficits. And
the protection lasts a lifetime, Shors
said november 13. The researchers
don’t yet know what about motherhood
is responsible for the protection.
— Tina Hesman Saey
Vitamin D is good for aging brain
Vitamin D may keep mental gears
greased during middle age. Middle-
aged rats fed high, low or standard
amounts of vitamin D performed
similarly on memory tests in which the
animals had to find a submerged plat-
form in a water tank, nada Porter of the
university of Kentucky and colleagues
found. But when the rats had to learn a
new location, “the high vitamin D guys
just made a beeline” for the new spot
while rats in the other two groups swam
aimlessly, Porter said during a presen-
tation november 12.
— Tina Hesman Saey
Two brains slide into a scanner
Scientists have uncovered what
happens when two minds meet.
neuroscientist Ray Lee of Princeton
university and colleagues scanned 18
pairs of eye-locked people in a single
MRI machine — four romantic partners,
12 female-female pairs and two male-male pairs. Patterns of shared behavior
depended on the people’s relationship, the team reported november 14.
Between friends, activity in the basal
ganglia, a region involved in social interaction, was synchronized. For lovers,
the connection happened in the posterior cingulate cortex, a region with a role
in awareness. — Laura Sanders
