Professor Ken Paller, of the Department of Psychology, found in a new study that learning a novel physical action can be enhanced during sleep.
These findings suggest that the rehabilitation of stroke survivors and people with neurological disorders can be accelerated through sleep-based stimulation.
“Our results demonstrate sleep’s importance for learning to perform novel actions,” said Paller. “The conclusions of our study may apply more widely to skills that people strive to acquire, such as learning a new dance move, a new athletic move, or a fine-motor skill like manipulating a scalpel.”
Paller and a team of researchers studied healthy individuals as they learned to perform novel actions with specific arm muscles in which they had to learn to contract individual muscles and pairs of muscles.
Many stroke survivors can’t do this seemingly simple movement because their muscles act against each other in abnormal ways, called abnormal co-activation or abnormal coupling. Thus, learning to isolate muscle contractions to perform tasks can help their rehabilitation.
“Most people understand intentional practice aids learning,” Paller said. “We propose in addition to this practice, brain processing that escapes our awareness, such as during sleep, contributes in important ways to learning skills and acquiring new knowledge.”
Researchers influenced the sleeping brain by presenting sounds associated with a subset of those novel actions to isolate muscles. When people woke up, they performed the actions again, and the performance of the actions was quicker and more efficient than the performance of the actions that were not cued during sleep.
The Paller lab has worked to launch a clinical trial with chronic stroke survivors. The goal is to see if the nightly memory reactivation of learning new movements, as an adjunct to MyoCI therapy sessions during the day, improves their ability to use their arms.
Read more about the study in Northwestern Now.