Easy Learnin'

Good news for procrastinating students - a nasal spray developed by a team of German scientists promises to give late night cram sessions a major boost, if a good night’s sleep follows. And by good night I think they mean in a bed, with less than four beers consumed.

In a recent report that nabbed the cover story of the current FASEB Journal(!), scientists showed that a molecule from the body’s immune system, interleukin-6, helped the brain retain emotional and procedural memories during REM sleep when administered through the nose.

To make this discovery, they had 17 healthy young men spend two nights in the laboratory. On each night after reading either an emotional or neutral short story, they sprayed a fluid into their nostrils which contained either interleukin-6 or a placebo fluid. The subsequent sleep and brain electric activity was monitored throughout the night. The next morning subjects wrote down as many words as they could remember from each of the two stories. Those who received the dose of IL-6 could remember more words.

That is an improvement from the white powders I recall from school. All three were white, and none of them helped with retaining information. But if you wanted to feel like you were made of clouds, needed to clean your room for two days straight, or just party and fuck like a champ, then they had those covered...