UCR psychologist Sara Mednick and her team of researchers have received about $2.7 million in federal funding for her research on sleep and its importance on memory. Mednick’s research focuses on the effects of Ambien on college-age people’s ability to learn and the effects of Ritalin and Adderall on the cognition of people serving in the military. The funding is being provided by the National Institute on Aging, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Defense — Office of Naval Research (ONR) for different applications of her sleep research.
Mednick’s research is part of her decade-long look into how naps affect memory and was first sparked in an undergraduate class taught by Harvard professor of psychiatry Robert Stickgold. “He showed that you need to have 6-8 hours of sleep to show memory benefits from sleep. In light of his findings, I wanted to know why short naps could make people feel so good. What was so special about napping?” she said in an interview.
In one project which began in 2013 with a $1.25 million research grant from the National Institute on Aging, Mednick and her team of researchers studied the effect of Ambien and Xyrem on a sample of people from the ages of 18 to 49. They found that Ambien use increased verbal memory retention, which is the ability to remember spoken information. She is now interested in exploring the impacts the research may have on college students who take the drug to improve their studying.
“If we discover that the pills are not making students think better and the pills are also ruining their sleep, that information can be used by students, doctors and school administration to make decisions about how these drugs are used. If we discover that the pills are making students perform better, that will also be important information for the campus as a whole to consider as an ethical and medical issue,” she said.
Mednick will also share a $450,000 grant from the NSF with UC Berkeley neuroscientist Michael Silver to study the importance of neurotransmitters in the formation of memories.
The ONR has also awarded Mednick $995,381 to look at the effects of psychostimulants like Ritalin and Adderall on cognition and sleep. The military’s interest in this research may be due to the “go” pills administered to servicemen and women to keep them alert during long periods of time and “no go” pills to encourage sleep.
“I don’t know exactly how ONR will use our findings,” said Mednick frankly. “However, it’s clear that not enough research has gone into investigating the effect of “go pills” and “no-go pills” on sleep and cognition. That is what we aim to discover.”
UCR students like fifth-year psychology major Evan Reyna are excited about this research and said, “I think it’s really really interesting. There’s a lot that we don’t understand about (the sleep and memory) processes. This research will hopefully give us a tool to understand them better.”
