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Memory can be a really tricky thing, which a lot of people are trying to get the hang of. This is especially important for those who really need to remember stuff that they study for the next day. These folks are in luck because scientists have just discovered how the so-called “Princess Leia” brainwaves can help store memory better during sleep.
The brainwaves are called as such because they look like the iconic hair buns that Princess Leia from the Star Wars franchise had, MedicalXpress reports. These brainwaves create a pattern on both sides, circling around each other. According to the scientists that made this discovery, this is responsible for compartmentalizing and organizing memories from early in the day during sleep.
Terrence Sejnowski, head of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at Salk Institute is one of the people behind the discovery. He said that the “Princess Leia” brainwave is a huge advancement in neuroscience.
"The scale and speed of Princess Leia waves in the cortex are unprecedented, a discovery that advances the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative," Sejnowski said.
Short-term memory storage has long been attributed to the part of the brain called the hippocampus, Science Daily reports. These are the memories that were accumulated in a matter of hours or during the whole day.
Long-term memory pertains to those that go back months or years, and this is stored in what’s called the neocortex. In terms of order of business, information is first processed by the senses, is stored in the hippocampus for the immediate time, and then transferred all the way to the neocortex during sleep. This process is called memory consolidation.
One of the things associated with memory consolidation is something called sleep spindles, which rotate around the neocortex in order to make sense of data based on their relationship with each other. At least, that’s what the latest findings hinted at. Before the discovery of the “Princess Leia” brainwave, it was difficult for researchers to track sleep spindles to see exactly how they associate with each other.
Now, Sjnoeski and his partner Lyle Muller are hypothesizing that during REM sleep, the circular patterns peak and ebb in an effort to process information and store it with appropriate links depending on which senses had to do with which memory. The implications of which could include developing methods to actually manipulate memory.
