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Pharmacological REM sleep suppression paradoxically improves rather than impairs skill memory

Nature Neuroscience volume 12, pages 396–397 (2009)Cite this article

Abstract

Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep has been considered important for consolidation of memories, particularly of skills. Contrary to expectations, we found that REM sleep suppression by administration of selective serotonin or norepinephrine re-uptake inhibitors after training did not impair consolidation of skills or word-pairs in healthy men but rather enhanced gains in finger tapping accuracy together with sleep spindles. Our results indicate that REM sleep as a unitary phenomenon is not required for skill-memory consolidation.

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Figure 1: Experimental procedure and main results.

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Acknowledgements

We thank E. Wiege, I. von Lützau, H. Ruf and A. Otterbein for technical assistance and L. Marshall for helpful discussions. This work was supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft SFB 654 'Plasticity and Sleep'.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neuroendocrinology, University of Lübeck, Haus 23a, Ratzeburger Allee 160, Lübeck, 23538, Germany

    Björn Rasch, Julian Pommer, Susanne Diekelmann & Jan Born

  2. Department of Molecular Psychology, University of Basel, Missionsstrasse 60/62, Basel, 4055, Switzerland

    Björn Rasch

Authors
  1. Björn Rasch
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  2. Julian Pommer
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  3. Susanne Diekelmann
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  4. Jan Born
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Contributions

B.R., J.P. and S.D. conducted the experiments and analyzed the data. B.R. and J.B. designed the experiments and wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Björn Rasch or Jan Born.

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Supplementary Tables 1–6, Supplementary Methods and Supplementary Results (PDF 401 kb)

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Rasch, B., Pommer, J., Diekelmann, S. et al. Pharmacological REM sleep suppression paradoxically improves rather than impairs skill memory. Nat Neurosci 12, 396–397 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2206

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