The 3^rd Annual AANOS "Fun"draising Event and Awards Ceremony will be held on Friday evening, June 8, 2012 at the Hyatt Hotel in Atlanta, GA.

All Proceeds Benefit the AANOS Scholarship and CME Funds. Private and Corporate Contributions are appreciated. Please contact us to contribute to our ongoing "Fun"d Raising Campaign.

FEATURING:

"Sleep on the Brain: The Role of Sleep and Dreams in Off-Line Memory Processing (How Surgeons Use Sleep to Maximize Surgical Outcomes)"

Dr. Robert Stickgold

Director, Center for Sleep and Cognition

Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Dr. Robert Stickgold

Visit Dr. Stickgold with Tedx on You Tube

Debra Winger and Dr. Stickgold on Brainwave

Dr. Stickgold studies the role of sleep and dreaming in learning and memory processes. He has studied how dreams change in response to mental challenges, ranging from computer games to living in a zero gravity environment on the International Space Station.

Bob Stickgold is a native of Chicago. He attended college at Harvard University, and received his PhD in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He is currently an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and serves as the Director of Harvard's Center for Sleep and Cognition. He is the author of numerous scientific articles, as well as two science fiction novels, and his work is frequently cited in both leading scientific journals and the popular press. 

Objectives:

The benefits that sleep confers on memory are surprisingly widespread. Understanding the extent of these benefits, as well as the mechanisms underlying them, is of value to the clinician both in evaluating cognitive and memory deficits in patients, and for better understanding one’s one learning processes.

For simple procedural skills – how to ride a bicycle or distinguish different coins in one’s pocket – a night of sleep or an afternoon nap following learning leads to an absolute and dramatic improvement in performance. Sleep also stabilizes verbal memories, reducing their susceptibility to interference and decay, processes that all too easily lead to forgetting.

But the action of sleep can be more sophisticated than simply strengthening and stabilizing memories. It can lead to the selective retention of emotional memories, or even of emotional components of a scene, while allowing other memories and parts of a scene to be forgotten. It can extract the gist from a list of words, or the rules governing a complex probabilistic game. It can lead to insights ranging from finding the single word that logically connects three apparently unrelated words, to discovering an unexpected rule that allows for the more efficient solving of mathematical problems. It can facilitate the integration of new information into existing networks of related information and help infants learn artificial grammars.

Dreams likewise appear to create meaning, although how this is done is less clear. Recently learned material is often incorporated into dream content. Experimental studies have shown that such incorporation into sleep onset dreams occurs in direct, unambiguous form for as many as 90% of subjects. More recent studies have shown that sleep-dependent memory enhancement is strongly correlated with incorporation of images related to the learned material into dreams reported on awakening. Surprisingly, the reported dream content does not itself appear capable of enhancing performance. Rather, recent memories appear to undergo “whole-brain processing” during sleep, such that the appearance of a task in dreams indicates that memories of the task are being processed across the brain, with some regions, such as the hippocampus, stabilizing and enhancing the specific learned material, while other regions act to calculate the salience of the memories and their relevance to associated memories and skills.
 

Don't miss this event this year at our 36^th Annual AANOS Scientific Meeting held in Conjunction with the 74^th Annual Surgical Update of the International College of Surgeons in Atlanta, GA.

See You in Atlanta!!