Better than sham? A double-blind placebo-controlled neurofeedback study in primary insomnia.

See Thibault et al. (doi:10.1093/awx033) for a scientific commentary on this article.

Enhancing sleep quality and memory in insomnia using instrumental sensorimotor rhythm conditioning.

EEG recordings over the sensorimotor cortex show a prominent oscillatory pattern in a frequency range between 12 and 15 Hz (sensorimotor rhythm, SMR) under quiet but alert wakefulness. This frequency range is also abundant during sleep, and overlaps with the sleep spindle frequency band. In the present pilot study we tested whether instrumental conditioning of SMR during wakefulness can enhance sleep and cognitive performance in insomnia.

Susceptibility to declarative memory interference is pronounced in primary insomnia.

Sleep has been shown to stabilize memory traces and to protect against competing interference in both the procedural and declarative memory domain. Here, we focused on an interference learning paradigm by testing patients with primary insomnia (N = 27) and healthy control subjects (N = 21). In two separate experimental nights with full polysomnography it was revealed that after morning interference procedural memory performance (using a finger tapping task) was not impaired in insomnia patients while declarative memory (word pair association) was decreased following interference.

Assessment of a wireless headband for automatic sleep scoring.

Purpose: Classically, professional assessment of sleep is done in the sleep laboratory using whole-night polysomnography (PSG). However, given a misbalance between accredited sleep laboratories and the large amount of patients suffering from sleep disorders, only few receive appropriate diagnostic assessment. Recently, some low-cost home sleep scoring systems have been proposed, yet such systems are rarely tested scientifically.

Consolidation of temporal order in episodic memories.

Even though it is known that sleep benefits declarative memory consolidation, the role of sleep in the storage of temporal sequences has rarely been examined. Thus we explored the influence of sleep on temporal order in an episodic memory task followed by sleep or sleep deprivation. Thirty-four healthy subjects (17 men) aged between 19 and 28 years participated in the randomized, counterbalanced, between-subject design.

Event-related activity and phase locking during a psychomotor vigilance task over the course of sleep deprivation.

There is profound knowledge that sleep restriction increases tonic (event-unrelated) electroencephalographic (EEG) activity. In the present study we focused on time-locked activity by means of phasic (event-related) EEG analysis during a psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) over the course of sleep deprivation. Twenty healthy subjects (10 male; mean age ± SD: 23.