Targeted memory reactivation using auditory cues during sleep can improve memory consolidation.

“here's how it goes I'm going to have you learn a set of associations have you ever played that card game I think in America it's called memory which is very apt where you get a deck of cards and it has two of the same items two houses two cars two fire engines two cattles and you Shuffle the cards and then you put them face down in a big Square in a big Matrix and over time you have to turn over one card and it's a kettle and then I'm just going to randomly pick another card and it's a fire engine uh okay but gradually you start to learn where each one of the purs are located so what's clever about that is we would do that type of what's called a Pur Association me memory test you have you you learn these Pur Associates and then we test you after night of sleep and you're better however if for as you're turning those items over I play a congruent sound so let's say you turn over the fire engine and then when you turn over the other fire engine I'm going to start playing a fire engine noise in the background so I'm bonding the association of the memory card purs with this tone with this congruent sound and then a kettle I turn over a kettle I turn over the other Kettle and it's whistling and then when you let people sleep at night if you start replaying those same tones at a subway sub Awakening threshold so you're not waking people up”

“and the next day it turns out that those things I reactivated are much more strongly Consolidated by way of sleep than those things I didn't so that's the basic method of what we call TMR targeted memory reactivation”

“there was a very recent study from um uh Sophie Schwarz and her colleagues at the University of Geneva that did an even more ingenious study and they were able to nudge the effectiveness of that treatment from 66% up to 92% and they used an additional memory related research tool we've uh come up with in sleep science and it's called TMR or targeted memory reactivation”