If you’re a college student thinking of cramming for finals, you might want to adopt a more restful strategy.

Scientists have shown that sleep plays a crucial role in memory. As the brain goes down for the night – or even for a nap – what’s been experienced during the day is carefully sorted through and then filed away in permanent storage for easy access later.

Building on that discovery, German researchers have shown in an intriguing experiment that the improvements in memory that we get during our slumbers be boosted even further if we’re exposed to a very specific kind of sound when we’re in deep sleep.

The researchers suspected that little clicking sounds played in synchrony with our brain’s natural oscillations during deep sleep might pump up the oscillations, thereby improving sleep – and also memory.

“Imagine the sleeping brain as a swing which oscillates slowly back and forth,” says study co-author Jan Born, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Tubingen. “The auditory stimulation acts as a gentle nudge of the swing at its highest point [to enhance] the down swinging direction.”

For the new study, Born and his colleagues asked 11 volunteers to memorize 120 word pairs. The words in each pair were related to one another to make them easier to remember, so, for example, “brain” might be paired with “consciousness” and “problem” with “solution.”

In the evening, the volunteers were tested. A researcher would say one of the words from the pair and the volunteer was to try to remember the other.

Then the volunteers were sent off to the sleep lab where their brain activity was monitored throughout the night.

In the first part of the experiment, clicking noises were played through headphones when volunteers reached deep – or slow wave – sleep. In the morning, they were again tested on how well they remembered the word pairs.

A week later the volunteers were again brought into the lab and the experiment was run exactly as it had been the first time, except that there were no clicking sounds during the night.

To see whether the sounds had improved memory, the researchers subtracted the scores from the evening tests (taken before sleep) from the scores from the morning tests.

In both parts of the experiment, morning scores were improved over evening ones. When there was no clicking during the night, people, on average, remembered 13 more word pairs in the morning than in the evening. But the biggest difference was when people were exposed to clicking during the night. They remembered 22 more word pairs in the morning than they had in tests the evening before. That’s almost double the improvements brought on by sleep alone.

So, will college students be rushing out to buy new-fangled headphones that click in the middle of the night?

Not just yet, Born says.

“The creation of head phones that automatically apply auditory stimuli following the stimulation protocol presented in our publication is possible, [but] not so easy,” he explains. “There is ongoing work on these applied frontiers and therefore the development of such devices in the long-term is not so far-fetched.”

One big hurdle to developing a memory enhancing device is that the clicking sound must be in rhythm with the brain’s oscillations. And that, currently, requires the sleeper to be hooked up to an EEG in a sleep lab so brain waves can be monitored.

In the meantime, specialists may want to use the new method to improve sleep quality in people who are restless during the night, Born says.

“The most obvious application for our finding is in clinical settings, in order to enhance the slow oscillation sleep rhythm and thus improve slow wave sleep in certain forms of insomnia,” he explains. 

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From time to time Dr. Oliver Sacks is haunted by musical symbols: notes, clefs, staffs and bar lines all fly by his eyes uninvited and in rapid succession. The celebrated neuroscientist can “see” the imaginary scores despite, or perhaps because of, his partial blindness.

As it turns out, Sacks is not alone. People from around the world have been writing him letters describing the music-oriented hallucinations that come unexpectedly and unbidden.  He’s described their experiences in a new report published in the journal Brain.

“When they happen you’re startled,” says Sacks, a professor of neurology at New York University and author of the 2012 bestseller, “Hallucinations.”

“It’s different from imagination. When you imagine something, it’s yours because you have imagined it. But when this happens to you, you’re startled. You wonder, ‘Who ordered this up? Where did it come from?’”

More often than not, people who are visited by these hallucinations of musical notation have problems with their eyesight like Sacks, but the visions can come to people suffering from Parkinson’s disease or even just a fever, he says. While they often come to people who are musically oriented, they can also appear to those who can’t read a note.

Sacks describes the case of 75-year-old Ted R., who developed Parkinson’s in his early 60s. Despite the disease, Ted is still an active scholar and writer - and a gifted pianist who’s been having musical hallucinations for the last two years.

The first time the musical notations appeared, he’d been reading a book. He turned away from it for a few seconds, and when he glanced back at the pages in front of him, the text had been replaced by a musical score.

Ted wondered whether the score was actual music and has tried many times to either transcribe or to perform it, but so far has found that “the music is scarcely playable because it is highly ornamented,” Sacks writes.

But Ted perseveres. Having discovered that he can summon up the hallucinations by staring at a text on a printed page, he will put a newspaper on his music stand and wait for the notes to appear. Hampered by their complexity and the speed with which they disappear, he’s had little success and so far, no great symphony has arisen from the elusive illusions.  

Another letter writer, whom Sacks calls Arthur S., finds the hallucinations to be irksome rather than entertaining. Arthur is a surgeon and an amateur pianist who is losing his eyesight to macular degeneration. “He was quite annoyed, as they would appear on a letter he was trying to write or something he was trying to read,” Sacks says.

The hallucinations may offer scientists more than merely some entertaining stories about brain quirks. Sacks hopes they will teach us something about the networks that process musical scores. Researchers have already scanned the brains of people who hallucinate faces, Sacks says. “One finds that the part of the brain in the back of the right hemisphere that is normally responsible for recognizing faces, has taken on a life of its own,” he says.

Scanning people who suffer musical hallucinations might be even more interesting.

“A musical score is a complicated sort of thing,” he explains. “It might show us how many parts of the brain can be integrated together as they are in reading music – and also presumably in hallucinating about it.”

Sacks hopes his article will spark more research and prompt scientists to scan the brains of people in the midst of a musical hallucination. “One of my reasons for publishing this in ‘Brain’ is to say to my colleagues, ‘Hey guys, this is something interesting. Take it and run with it.’”

Related:

Head injury turns man into musical savant

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It took almost two years for Nicole Delien’s family to find someone who could explain the mysterious illness that was making their little girl “sleep” for as long as 64 days. During those excruciating 21 months doctors diagnosed everything from West Nile to epilepsy.

Some even suggested that Nicole’s parents might be drugging her or somehow manipulating her sleep – an accusation that led to a report to Child Protective Services.

Finally, when the family was at their wits end, they found Dr. Michael Rancurello at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, who diagnosed Nicole, 17, with an exceedingly rare disorder called Kleine-Levin Syndrome. Rancurello wasn’t an expert in the syndrome, but by chance he’d already treated several patients with the disorder that periodically sends patients into a strange state in which they alternate between long stretches of actual sleep and periods of semi conscious delirium.

Nicole was 6 years old when contracted a virus that seems to have sparked her condition.

“In the beginning we thought she had the flu because she had flu-like symptoms and a high fever,” Vicki Delien, Nicole’s mom, told TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie. “But then she just became, as the days progressed, more confused and lethargic. We didn’t know what was going on. “

No one knows exactly what is going wrong in the brains of KLS patients. What experts do know is that it strikes more than twice as many boys (70 percent) as girls and that patients can abruptly drop into a state in which they will sleep for as many as 20 hours a day - Nicole sometimes sleeps for 19 hours in a row - and then for a few hours pop into a sort of twilight state that is similar to what sleep walkers experience.

Rancurello describes this state as more of a delirium than a true period of wakefulness.

“It’s not really sleeping,” he told Guthrie. “If anybody’s come out of anesthesia or had an elderly family member who has had surgery and gets confused and talks out of their mind, that’s basically what this is. It is a delirium.”

Affected teens and their families are advised by the National Institutes of Health to wait out the syndrome, since it has been shown to resolve on its own in most cases. “Episodes eventually decrease in frequency and intensity over the course of eight to 12 years,” the NIH webpage on the disorder notes.

Once Rancurello was on the case, the family at least had a diagnosis and some help in managing the syndrome. But it hasn’t been easy for Nicole or her family.

While Nicole “sleeps” life continues to fly by. One of her greatest disappointments is that she missed being with her grandfather before he died. When an episode struck, he was alive. When she came to again, her parents told her that he had died.

“I was so close to him,” Nicole said. “I missed the last two months of seeing and talking to him.”

Compounding the problem is the unpredictability of the episodes.

“Sometimes,” Nicole said, “Sometimes I’m afraid to go asleep at night.”

The syndrome has been taxing for Nicole’s family, too.

When she’s experiencing an episode, she never truly conscious even during the periods when her eyes are open and she’s managed to get out of bed to go to the bathroom.

Sometimes she feeds herself when in this twilight state, but her family has to take her to the hospital from time to time to get her rehydrated and fed through an IV tube.

Making matters worse, she remembers nothing from the episode, even from those times when she was actually talking to her parents.

And that, perhaps, is the toughest thing for Nicole, who hopes that by speaking out she’ll help educate the public.

“I would want people to know that it’s not fun,” she said, “because you miss a lot.”

While most of us have trouble remembering the details of even the most important days of our lives, college student Aurelien Hayman can recall every moment of his life, no matter how mundane.

Give him a year and a date and he can tell you what day of the week it was, what the weather was like -  even what he ate for breakfast.

“I can just remember these sorts of things without even trying – and without them having any importance,” Hayman told TODAY. “I just remember them.”

Hayman is one of a small group of people who have extraordinary ability to recall specific details of events, even ordinary days, that happened years ago. TODAY has interviewed several of them over the years, including actress Marilu Henner, who stunned Meredith Vieira in an interview with the vivid recall of the last time they’d brushed past one another.

Though the phenomenon has only recently been identified, scientists have given this special kind of memory a name: Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, or HSAM.

Because it’s so new, there’s been little research on the topic. But in July of this year a study of 11 people with HSAM was published in the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.

Researchers from the University of California, Irvine, interviewed  11 people with HSAM and scanned their brains. And while the researchers did identify nine brain areas that seemed to be different in size and shape from those of volunteers with typical memories, what really caught the researchers’ attention were the differences in behavior.  

People with HSAM tend to obsess over events (even mundane ones) more than the average person. They ruminate over what happened during the day and organize everything in their minds over and over again.

In fact, they often report “habitually recalling their memories, a seemingly compulsive tendency,” noted Aurora K.R. LePort and her colleagues. “Every night before bed one participant recalls what occurred on that day X number of years ago. Another recalls, while stuck in traffic, as many days as possible from a certain year.”

Memory expert Dr. Gary Small believes we should study people like Hayman and Henner to help people who are losing their memory due to disease or old age.

“We are involved in memory training techniques to teach people to try to improve their memories – and of things that individuals with extraordinary biographical memory seem to do instinctively,” said Small, director of the Longevity Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of “The Alzheimer’s Prevention Program: Keep Your Brain Healthy for the Rest of Your Life.”

“I think that probably their brains are wired so that they can naturally do what we teach others to do to improve their memories: focusing attention, creating associations and giving those associations meaning.”

While a perfect memory might seem like a gift, some people find it a real burden.

Jill Price, 46,  wishes she couldn’t remember everything quite so well. She is plagued by her inability to escape unhappy memories that are so detailed that they feel like they just happened.

“Thinking about something from 20 years ago that means absolutely nothing to me today, but still bothers me or still upsets me,” Jill said.  It’s like yesterday. It really is.”

But for Hayman and most of the people in the new study, HSAM is a gift.            

“As a group they view their autobiographical memory ability as a positive attribute,” LePort and her colleagues concluded.

Hayman himself only recently realized that his memory was out of the ordinary.

“Now that I know it’s something special, I think I’ll sort of value it more,” he told TODAY.

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Nick Hilton watched in horror as his wife Jamie stepped backward and tumbled 12 feet down into a culvert, hitting her head hard on a boulder at the bottom. Looking down at his motionless wife, Nick knew she’d suffered a severe injury.

“I wasn’t sure if I was screaming her name out loud or just in my mind,” Nick told TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie. “But I just kept screaming her name over and over again. As I looked down on her I realized I had to get down there as soon as I could.”

TODAY

Jamie Hilton, recovering from a brain injury. Doctors removed part of her skull and stored it in her stomach for 42 days to let her brain heal.

Nick picked her up as she took a gasp of breath.  

The couple had been fishing in the wilderness of Hell’s Canyon, along the border of Idaho and Oregon, and they were far from any help -- or roads.  A boat took Jamie to an ambulance, which then met up with a helicopter that airlifted her to the emergency room at Saint Alphonus Regional Medical Center in Boise. In all it took three hours.

At the hospital, doctors told Nick that his wife's brain was badly injured and she had only a 50/50 chance of surviving. They told him that her brain was rapidly swelling and the only hope was to remove part of her skull to allow the brain to expand without being crushed against the hard, unforgiving bone. They stored the skull fragment in her abdomen for safekeeping.

That was back in June. Today the former beauty queen has almost no after-effects from her accident. She remembers little of what happened after stepping back to reel in the fish that her husband had hooked for her.

“You know, I don’t remember much,” the former Mrs. Idaho told Guthrie. “I remember he cast the line and handed me the pole. I remember the fish on the line and pulling back and that’s it. I don’t remember falling. I don’t remember landing.”

Jamie remembers waking up in the hospital room.  “When I woke up I was surrounded by my family and Nick,” she told Guthrie. “There was a great feeling in the room.  A peace and a joy. I could feel their joy when I opened my eyes."

TODAY

When Jamie Hilton woke up in the hospital, first she saw her family surrounding her and felt their love and joy. Then, she looked down and saw this in her abdomen... part of her skull, stored there while her brain healed.

Then Jamie started to explore the damage she’d sustained.

“I remember lifting my gown and looking down and just seeing this huge bulge in my stomach and thinking, ‘Is this real?’” she told TODAY. “Obviously it was not a dream. They had put the skull in my stomach.”

Jamie’s surgeon, Dr. Thomas Manning, explained why they decided to store the piece of skull in her abdomen.

“The body takes care of it,” he told TODAY. “The body keeps the bone sterile. And then when you’re ready to put the bone back you have it right there.”

And 42 days after the bone was removed, doctors reattached it to Jamie’s skull with titanium screws. Then they sewed her scalp back together. Today there is an inch-long crop of hair covering the scars.

Turns out the procedure Jamie had is commonly used for patients with severe brain injuries.

TODAY

When his wife Jamie was injured, Nick Hilton prayed that she would wake up -- whatever shape she would be in. Today, she's made a full recovery.

“It’s relatively routine,” explained Dr. Ted Schwartz, a professor of neurology at New York Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center.  “The surgery that Jamie had is called a hemicraniectomy. When there is severe trauma to the brain, the brain swells and the skull is a closed cavity. So when that swelling occurs, the pressure goes up inside the head and it can be dangerous.

“So we remove part of the skull – about 25 percent. And we then need a place to keep it. And there are a couple of different options, but one of the best options is to plant it in the abdomen. It is not only sterile, but it travels with you.”

In fact, the very same procedure was used when TV anchor Bob Woodruff suffered a brain injury while covering the war in Iraq.

“Bob Woodruff had a hemicraniectomy done in Afghanistan and he was able to travel with the bone in his belly and then they could put it back in the United States,” Schwartz told Guthrie.

Looking at video and photos of her husband cradling her body while they waited for help, Jamie started to tear up. “It’s so touching to see Nick taking care of me,” she told Guthrie.

Though she’s healthy today, Jamie says the accident has made a lasting difference.

“We all face the morning and decide how we’re going to handle today,” she told Guthrie with a cracking voice. “I think the biggest thing that has changed is it’s not really a decision anymore. I am so grateful the minute my feet touch the ground. I get to go make breakfast, take my kids to school. Things that seemed so mundane before are not mundane anymore. I am just so thankful and happy." 

TODAY

Jamie Hilton told TODAY her near-death experience has given her greater appreciation for everyday moments like taking her three children, pictured here, to school.

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Scientists have long assumed that fading memories are just a normal part of aging. But a new study suggests that certain 80-somethings can remember every bit as well as people much younger.

Researchers from Northwestern University found that these mentally sharp octogenarians, dubbed SuperAgers, also have brains that look very much like those of people in middle-age, according to the study published in the Journal of International Neuropsychological Society.

For the new study, researchers used MRIs to look at the thickness of the outer layer of the brain, a region called the cortex, in SuperAgers, normally aging 80-somethings, and healthy 50- to 65-year-olds.

What they found was intriguing – the SuperAgers had brains that looked very much like those of the younger people in the study and in some ways looked even healthier. 

"We were very surprised at that," says study co-author Emily Rogalski, an assistant research professor at the cognitive neurology and Alzheimer's disease center at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

"When we looked at cortical thickness, we were very shocked to see that even with a 20- to 30-year age gap, there was seemingly no difference in the cortical thickness," she says. "In normally aging 80-year-olds, you see quite a bit of cortical thinning, even among those who are still performing normally for their age."

The cortex is key since it's involved in memory, attention, and complex thinking, also known as executive function.

Rogalski and her colleagues tested the memories and cognitive skills of 12 Chicago-area SuperAgers and 14 middle-aged volunteers. They then scanned all 26 with a 3D MRI machine and compared both groups of scans to images from normally aging 80-somethings that came from a national data bank.

Finding a group of SuperAgers was no easy task, however.

While plenty of 80-somethings showed up at the lab saying their memories were great, most didn’t remember as well as healthy middle-aged people do.

"We weren't even sure if we would be able to find any SuperAgers since we set the bar so high," says Rogalski. "They had to be as good as 50- to 65-year olds. We screened 300 people who thought they had good memories and found 30 SuperAgers."

And the MRIs showed why the 30 SuperAgers were so mentally sharp.

Rogalski found the SuperAgers' cortexes were as thick as those in people 20 to 30 years younger.

Experts believe that shrinking cortexes are a sign that cells are shriveling and dying with age - sometimes killed off by the same abnormal proteins as you see in Alzheimer's brains. One finding that really surprised Rogalski and her colleagues: a region deep in the brain, called the anterior cingulate was actually larger in SuperAgers than it was in middle-aged folks.

The anterior cingulate is very important for attention. Studies have shown that one of the reasons memory fails as we age is that we can't focus as well as we did when we were younger.

"If I were to tell you ten things you need to pick up at the grocery store and then the phone rang and you got distracted talking to your best friend you'd probably find it hard to remember those ten things when you got to the store," Rogalski explains. "That wouldn't mean your memory was bad, but rather, that you weren't able to focus on the task."

Rogalski hopes the new research on SuperAgers may help scientists unlock the secrets of these "youthful brains" and find ways to protect us against from age-related damage.

"This is the first step in a new way of looking at this - a road less traveled in aging research," she says. "Instead of looking at what is going wrong with the brain, we want to know what is going right."

As for why some people are SuperAgers and some aren't, the research team can't provide any answers at this point. It could be all related to genetics or a combination of genes and the environment: no clues popped up during the SuperAger's interviews that set them apart from people who had aged normally.

But the question of whether there's something we can do to keep mentally sharp is something Rogalski is hoping she'll be able to answer as she continues to study the SuperAger phenomenon.

Related: 

• Seniors say they sleep better than young adults
• Real 'Benjamin Button'? Stem cells reverse aging in mice

For those who need another reason, beyond the ick factor, to not eat raw crawfish, here’s a frightening fact: many of these crunchy crustaceans carry the infinitely more icky lungworms – which can burrow from your digestive tract into your lungs, cheeks, or even your brain.

A new government report describes the cases of nine Missouri folks whose bodies were invaded by the parasitic little flat worms, officially known as paragonimus kellicotti, after gobbling down raw crawfish on a drunken dare.

All nine got infected with paragoniumus between 2009 and 2010. Before that, there had been just seven cases reported between 1968 and 2008, according to the new report published this week in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention journal. Why the upsurge? Turns out that people in the country’s interior like to cool off by rafting down rivers -- which are populated by crawfish. And someone, somewhere, got the brilliant idea to dare a friend to gobble down a live one.

“What we’ve seen is that out on rivers people like to drink and do some things we might not normally do,” says study co-author Michael A. Lane, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at the Washington University School of Medicine. “We’ve seen a decent – though still relatively small – number of people eating raw crawfish on a dare after drinking beer.”

If you’re having trouble imagining someone consuming a live crawfish, just type the words “eating raw crawfish” into the search bar on YouTube and you’ll see plenty of people crunching away. Best to do this on an empty stomach. 

Scientists have discovered that many of the crawfish in Missouri’s rivers are infected with lungworms. “In some rivers as few as 40 percent of the crawfish had the parasite,” Lane says. “But in others it was as high as 70 percent. So, if you pull a crawfish out of the water, you’ve got a high likelihood of getting one with the parasite.”

The parasites are about the size of a grain of rice when they’re in a crawfish, Lane says. But they can grow as big as a half an inch once they’re inside the human body.

“After you eat the crawfish, the parasite comes out and migrates across the diaphragm,” Lane explains. “They burrow through the walls of the intestine, hoping to make it to the lungs where they can complete their life cycle and mature. Once in the lungs they form nodules that mature and grow. But sometimes they get lost on the way to the lungs and they can end up in other places. One of our patients had one that had gone to the brain. Another had one that had worked its way to the cheek.”

Lane’s study only looked at people who had been seen at his medical center, but Missouri isn’t the only place with hot weather, rivers and crawfish.

“All the pieces of the parasite’s life cycle are found throughout the country,” Lane points out. “There have been animal studies that have found them in Ohio, Colorado, and other places.”

Because of that, Lane suspects there may be even more cases of people out there with paragonimus symptoms – coughing, fever, shortness of breath, high white blood cell count, fluid in and around the lungs - who are being misdiagnosed with anything from tuberculosis to pneumonia to cancer.

And the misdiagnoses may cause more damage than the worm itself. One of Lane’s patients was on the verge of getting treated for cancer because doctors assumed that had to be the problem.

“He’d had multiple procedures for draining the fluid from his lungs – which eventually caused one of his lungs to collapse,” Lane says.

Another patient had a healthy gallbladder removed when doctors couldn’t find any other explanation for his chest pain.

The good news is that there is a very effective therapy. When patients take the medication praziquantel for three days, there is a 100 percent cure rate, Lane says.

The tricky thing is for doctors to first figure out whether a patient has the parasite since there is no good blood test.

“Probably the best diagnostic test we have is to ask the patient if they ate any raw crawfish,” Lane says. 

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Photos of chocolate cake and other sugary treats made regions of the brain known to be involved in appetite control light up, according to a new study.

Just glancing at a photo of a rich and gooey chocolate cake can set your brain circuits sparking, switching on cravings and revving up your appetite, a new study shows.

The proof is in the brain scans. Researchers found that when people stare at sugary treats, regions of the brain known to be involved in appetite control and pleasure and reward light up, according to the study presented at the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society.

The new study parallels earlier research in cocaine addicts. When addicts were shown anti-drug commercials that included crossed-out needles, the brain regions associated with pleasure fired up and the addicts reported increased craving. Contrary to public health officials’ plans, only the needles registered in the addicts’ brains, not the big red Xs crossing them out.

“We see parallels between substances of abuse, like cocaine, and highly palatable foods,” said the study’s lead author Dr. Kathleen Page, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California. “Some of the same brain regions light up.”

Page and her colleagues scanned 13 obese Hispanic women looking at images of alluring foods such as cupcakes, chocolate cake and chocolate chip cookies.

“What we saw was that the regions of the brain that are involved in reward and hunger lit up,” Page said.

The women, who were also asked to rate their appetite at the beginning and end of the experiment, reported greater hunger and desire for food after looking at the photos.

And in an intriguing second experiment, the researchers asked the women to each consume a sugary drink of approximately 200 calories. Then the researchers repeated the scans as before with the women looking at photos of tasty treats.

“Surprisingly, consumption of the sugar drink — which was essentially equivalent to a 16-ounce soda — actually increased the ratings of hunger and desire,” Page said. “We didn’t predict a hunger increase with the sugar drink. Apparently the brain saw it as an appetizer.”

It’s not clear how average people can protect themselves from photos of tempting treats, Page said. “It’s funny, but when I conducted the studies and looked at the pictures myself, I was thinking, ‘I could eat a piece of chocolate cake right now.’”

It is possible that there could be some sort of public health response, Page said. “You’re probably aware that Disney has said that in 2015 it will stop showing food and beverage ads on their children’s TV shows,” she said. “There have been behavioral studies showing that that the more children see these ads, the more they eat.”

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Could fear of the dark be ruining your sleep?

Scientists now say that many sleep problems can be traced to an anxiety that sparks as soon as the lights go down, according to a new study presented at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

The small study found that 50 percent of adults who reported sleep problems also admitted to being scared of the dark - and were also measurably more anxious when the lights were turned off.

“The good news, is that if this is what is going on, it’s very treatable,” said the study’s lead author Colleen Carney, an associate professor at Ryerson University in Toronto. “And it doesn’t take long to treat.”

To see if bad sleep might be phobia driven, Carney and her colleagues rounded up 93 college students and asked them to fill out surveys that included questions about their sleep quality and whether they were afraid of the dark.

Then the researchers ran an intriguing experiment: In the first half of the experiment the volunteers sat in a room with the lights on. In the second half, they sat with the lights off. All the while, the volunteers were wearing headsets that would periodically play a blast of noise.

“Then we watched their reactions in the light and the dark,” Carney said. “In the light they were no different. But in the dark, the poor sleepers were more likely to be startled.”

In other words, compared to the sound sleepers, the insomniacs were more likely to blink and to flinch when they heard the noise in the dark. In fact, the more times they heard the noise, the more anxious and jumpy they got. The good sleepers, in contrast, got used to hearing the noise and eventually stopped reacting to it.

Fear of the dark isn’t something that sleep doctors currently look for, Carney said. So the new research might open new avenues for treatment.

And the good news is that phobias often respond very quickly to treatment with exposure therapy, Carney added. So, just as a therapist can get you used to spiders and snakes by slowly exposing you to them, they’ll also be able get you over your fear of the dark.           

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No matter how much you try to hide your age, you can’t nip-and-tuck your scent away. People will still be able to figure out how old you are simply by taking a sniff.

Researchers have determined that there really is an “old person smell” -- and a young person smell and a middle-aged smell -- according to a study published Wednesday in PLoS ONE.

“This study shows you can’t fake it,” says study co-author Johan Lundstrom, an assistant professor at the Monell Chemical Senses Center and at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. “If you walk around a corner, you don’t have to look at someone to know they’re older; you can just sniff them out.”

At a time when we spray, spritz and anxiously try to scrub away and cover up our natural body odor, the new research should be reassuring to our noses. But our paranoia that we turn into pungent, musty moth balls as we age turns out to be completely wrong. Older people, in fact, have less intense -- and more pleasant -- scents than their younger counterparts, the new research indicates.

Scientists have long known that our bodies give off scents that contain a variety of chemicals and that those chemicals can convey a lot of information. But they didn’t know whether body odor changed with age in an easily detectable way. 

Though this is the first study to document that an “old person smell” exists, it’s recognized in many cultures around the world. The Japanese, in fact, have a special word to describe how old people smell: Kareishu.

Earlier studies in animals showed that body odor changes with age, Lundstrom says. He wondered whether that might be true for people, too.

To see if people could accurately identify a person’s age through smell, Lundstrom and his colleagues asked 41 volunteers to wear a special T-shirt to bed for five nights, after bathing and washing their hair with unscented products.

Each of the unscented shirts contained underarm pads which, by the end of five days, were steeped in the volunteer’s body odor.

Pieces of the pads were then dropped into glass jars, which were grouped by age: Some jars contained scents of 20- to 30-year-olds, some the scents of 45- to 55-year-olds, and some the scents of 75- to 95-year-olds.

The researchers then rounded up another 41 volunteers and had them sniff the jars. The volunteers were then asked to guess the age group associated with the scent in each jar and to rate the intensity of each scent and its pleasantness.

The volunteers were pretty good at figuring out the ages -- better than would be predicted by chance. But they were even more accurate when they were simply asked to group together all the jars that smelled like old people. Which means that they could detect the old person smell the best.

Intriguingly, the volunteers scored old people’s odors highest for pleasantness and lowest for intensity.

Lundstrom doesn’t know why our scents change with age. But he’s got a theory that it’s got to do with reproduction.

Other studies have shown that people often choose mates that are unlike them genetically. In fact, those who marry third cousins, have the highest reproductive success, Lundstrom says. And it’s by smell that we determine how closely related we are to the person sitting next to us, even if we’re unconscious of it.

Similarly, Lundstrom suspects that some women might seek out older men because they’ve proven that they’ve got longevity genes.

“We favor the older individuals because they are survivors,” he explains. “Of course, when that developed many thousands of years ago, we didn’t get that old. So, it’s not like we’re favoring 80 year-olds.”

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Lionsgate

Novels may have a lot more power than we think.

When you identify with a literary character, like Katniss Everdeen of the "Hunger Games" books, there’s a good chance you’ll become more like her, new study shows.

Researchers have found that when you lose yourself in a work of fiction, your behavior and thoughts can metamorphose to match those of your favorite character, according to the study published early online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 

The researchers believe that fictional characters can change us for the good.

So, if you bonded with Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” you might become more focused on ethical behavior, says the study’s lead author, Geoff Kaufman, a post-doctoral researcher at Tiltfactor Laboratories at Dartmouth College.

But the fiction-effect can have a dark side. “Think of 'American Psycho,'” Kaufman says. “The character is very likable and charismatic. But he’s a serial killer. To the extent that you connect with him, you may try to understand or justify the actions he’s committing.”

Kaufman and his co-author Lisa Libby of Ohio State University suspected that when people read a fictional story they vicariously experience their favorite character’s emotions, thoughts and beliefs in a process that’s been dubbed “experience-taking.”

Kaufman and Libby found that experience-taking can lead to real changes in the lives of readers. What the researchers can’t say yet is whether those changes are brief or long-lasting.

Kaufman suspects novels can sometimes be life-changing. “If you’ve got a deep connection with the characters, it can have a lasting impact,” he says. “It can inspire you to re-read something. And then the impact can be strengthened over time.”

The researchers ran several experiments to look at how we react to fiction. In one, they found that people who strongly identified with a fictional character who overcame many obstacles in order to vote were significantly more likely to vote in a real election days later than volunteers who read a different story.  

In another experiment, the researchers compared two groups of volunteers who read different versions of a story in which the protagonist was gay. In one version, readers didn’t learn till the end that the character was gay. In the other, they learned that detail right at the beginning.

Study volunteers who learned about the sexual orientation of the hero at the end of the story expressed more positive feelings towards gay people when they were questioned later on.

That’s because they got to know the character and connect with him before they had a chance to cloud their impression with gay stereotypes, Kaufman explains. Those who learned about the character’s sexual orientation early on didn’t relate to him as much because their stereotypes put distance between them and the character.

Kaufman believes that the fiction-effect only comes with written works. “When we watch a movie, by the very essence of it, we’re positioned as spectators,” he explains. “So it’s hard to imagine yourself as the character. I suspect that if you read the screenplay it would be more powerful as far as experience-taking goes.”

So, who is Kaufman’s favorite fictional personality? Anna Karenina, the protagonist in Leo Tolstoy’s novel of the same name.

“My identification with her might have inspired my research,” Kaufman muses. “It’s the connection with a female character and understanding her struggles and difficulty in adapting to life and society. Looking back, I think a lot of my favorites are strong, complex female characters struggling in society.”

What literary character do you most identify with, and why? Let us know in the comments here, or over on our Facebook page -- we may use you in an upcoming msnbc.com post! 

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Researchers have finally figured out why Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) had all those headaches. And, yes, the lightning bolt plays a role.

Patients often see multiple doctors before they get their headaches diagnosed – and Harry Potter, it turns out, is no exception.

Back in 2007 a leading headache specialist, after poring through Harry’s headache history, concluded that the boy’s intermittent stabbing head pain must be due to migraines. The specialist, Dr. Fred Sheftell, along with some colleagues described the diagnosis in a paper published in the journal Headache.

But the diagnosis didn’t completely fit Harry’s symptoms and over the years several other specialists have chimed in with their own expert opinions.

Now, with clues that came from the final chapter of Harry’s biography by J.K. Rowling, experts think they finally have the correct diagnosis - nummular headache. And they’ve described their reasoning in the most recent edition of Headache.

Many neurologists have never heard of nummular headaches, says the lead author, Dr. Matthew Robbins, an assistant professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the director of inpatient services at the Montefiore Headache Center.

And that’s partly because these kinds of headaches have only recently been identified and codified, he explained.

The telling symptom pointing to nummular headaches, Robbins says, is that every time Harry suffers from head pain it’s in a small spot in exactly the same place.

Another line of evidence: nummular headaches can be sparked by a head injury, like the one that led to Harry’s lightning bolt scar.

Robbins and his colleagues studied nummular headaches in dozens of real patients.  A telling sign is the lesions that “have been described to occur in scalp regions of [nummular headache] patients, although admittedly, none of these cutaneous lesions manifested in the shape of a lightning bolt,” the researchers explained in their article.

You may be wondering why experts spend their time diagnosing fictional characters.  It’s a good way to educate the public about a condition that can occur in children and often goes unrecognized, Robbins says.

“If you can get the word out to people who are suffering, it’s a positive thing,” Robbins says, adding, “and we had some fun along the way.”

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