Can Eight Hours of Sleep Enhance Memory?

Carmen Varela, Ph.D., grew up spending summers at her grandparents’ farm, and spent countless hours outside in nature. That time in nature piqued her interest and nurtured her curiosity in science, particularly neuroscience.

As Varela grew, so did her passion for neuroscience, with heightened interest in in understanding the functions of the brain while asleep.

After earning a doctoral degree in computational neuroscience from The University of Chicago, she spent more than 10 years narrowing her research in neuroscience even further by focusing on memory and sleep at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and at MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds and Machines.

Varela’s desire to expand her neuroscience research further, led her to FAU where she says she benefits from the different perspectives of neuroscience and psychology researchers and the freedom to be creative in the lab.

Now, as an assistant professor in the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science, Varela’s research continues in the brain, memory and sleep, with a focused understanding of cognitive processes like learning and memory. Her work concentrates on a region beneath the cortex known as the thalamus, which is a master integrator of information that participates in memory consolidation processes that occur during sleep.

Varela aims to understand how we consolidate our memories long term, how sleep and rest contribute to learning and memory and how the state of different diseases may distort these processes, leading to deficits in learning and memory.

She said she feels these processes can also be helpful in different aspects of life including education. For example, by understanding how a student learns and forms memories, those results can lead to the improvement of the educational system.

Varela notes how important resting and sleep are to the learning and memory parts in the brain. “If we are able to take advantage of our understanding of the cellular activity during those resting moments,” she said, “they will help us improve how we process information, and enhance our learning and memory abilities.”