Ken A. Paller
editKen A. Paller | |
|---|---|
| Born | |
| Nationality | U.S. Citizen |
| Alma mater | University of California, Los Angeles |
| Awards |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Memory, Memory and Sleep |
| Institutions | |
| Website | https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/paller/ https://cogns.northwestern.edu/ |
Ken A. Paller is a Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, USA. He holds the James Padilla Chair in Arts & Sciences and serves as Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Program in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences at Northwestern. He directs a training program for PhD students and postdocs, the Training Program in the Neuroscience of Human Cognition at Northwestern, supported by the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke. His work in cognitive neuroscience has focused on human memory, consciousness, sleep, dreaming, and related topics. He has published over 200 scientific articles, reviews, and book chapters.[1] His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health. the Mind Science Foundation, the Mind and Life Institute, and other foundations and funding agencies. He was awarded the Senator Mark Hatfield Award from the Alzheimer's Association in 2008. From 2008 to 2016, he served as Editor for the Memory Section of the journal Neuropsychologia. From 2011 to 2015 he served on the Annual Meeting Program Committee for the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and chaired this committee from 2013 to 2015. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and a Senior Fellow of the Mind and Life Institute.
Background
editPaller was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He graduated from Venice High School and then attended UCLA, where he majored in Psychobiology. For his junior year abroad, he attended the University of Kent at Canterbury. His PhD training in neuroscience was completed in 1986 at UCSD, where his mentors included Larry Squire, Steve Hillyard, and Marta Kutas. He then completed postdoctoral training at Yale, the University of Manchester, and Berkeley before becoming a professor at Northwestern University in 1994.
Research
editEarly Research - Memory
editPaller’s early research focused on aspects of human memory, including encoding and retrieval. He studied patients with memory disorders and healthy individuals using behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging methods. His early work documented neural signals at initial memory formation that predicted whether or not information would be remembered later. In a much-cited paper with Andrew R. Mayes and Marta Kutas in 1987, he introduced the term Dm to refer to the electrophysiological differences produced as a function of later memory performance.[2][3] With his student Brian Gonsalves and other colleagues, he studied neural events that led to false memories.[4][5] He also used electrophysiological methods to document differences in brain responses between conscious and unconscious memory phenomena.[6][7] Whereas memory phenomena are typically assessed in recall and recognition tests (declarative memory tests), Paller found different results when unconscious memory was assessed, as in perceptual priming and other implicit memory tests.
Later Research - Memory and Sleep
editPaller’s later research concerned the idea that learning is not a function only of the initial acquisition of knowledge, but that there are additional processing steps (known as consolidation) and that some of the work of consolidation takes place in the brain during sleep.[8] Work in his laboratory was prominent in showing how subtle auditory stimulation during sleep could shape memory storage.[9] These studies used a method that came to be known as Targeted Memory Reactivation or TMR. Studies with TMR showed that many types of learning are improved when pre-sleep learning is followed by memory reactivation during sleep.[10][11]
Paller’s lab group also contributed to adapting the TMR method to produce lucid-dreaming experiences. In the study of these unusual experiences, when people realize they are dreaming in the midst of a dream, real-time two-way communication between dreamer and experimenter was demonstrated.[12] In this way, the study of dreams can now include data on people’s experiences during a dream along with associated neural activity, instead of relying exclusively on people’s reports after they wake up to find out about their dreams.
Trainees
editPaller provided training to many students and postdoctoral fellows who have gone on to have their own successful scientific careers. His trainees include Charan Ranganath (University of California, Davis), Galit Yovel (Tel Aviv University), Brian Gonsalves (California State University East Bay), Christine Hooker (Rush University), Wen Li (Florida State University), Joel Voss (University of Chicago), Tim Sweeny (University of Denver), Robert Hurley (Cleveland State University), Heather Lucas (Louisiana State University), James Antony (California Polytechnic State University), Iliana Vargas (Chicago Public Schools), Jessica Creery (NIH), Sadie Witkowski (University of Chicago), Stephan Boehm (Bangor University), Carmen Westerberg (Texas State University), Robert Morrison (Loyola University Chicago), Delphine Oudiette (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, France), Xiaoqing Hu (Hong Kong University), Laura Batterink (University of Western Ontario), and Eitan Schechtman (University of California, Irvine).
Media Coverage
edit| Year | Title | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | The Dreaming Mind: Waking the Mysteries of Sleep | World Science Festival with Brian Greene: The Dreaming Mind |
| 2022 | Important advances in sleep research in 2021 | The Lancet Neurology |
| 2022 | Can you learn to put names to faces while you sleep? Here's what one study found | CNN |
| 2022 | Sleep, even naps, can improve memory | NEWSNATION |
| 2022 | The Late Show with Seth Meyers | The Late Show with Seth Meyers |
| 2022 | The Why - Ken Paller (Dreams) | The Why on Newsy |
| 2022 | While You Were Sleeping | This is Your Brain Podcast |
| 2022 | NBC’s Dr. John Torres talks with Dr. Ken Paller about sleep, memory, and dreams | NBC-News Doc to Doc |
| 2022 | Sleeping cements memories | The Naked Scientists |
| 2022 | Sleep Learning | The Crossover Podcast |
| 2021 | Memory And The Dreaming Mind | Science Friday |
| 2021 | Dream Hacking: Decisions, Addictions, and Sleep | PBS NOVA |
| 2021 | Communicating with a dreaming person is possible | PBS NOVA |
| 2021 | People Answer Scientists’ Queries in Real Time while Dreaming | Scientific American |
| 2021 | Scientists entered people’s dreams and got them ‘talking’ | Science |
| 2021 | Scientists break through the wall of sleep to the untapped world of dreams | NSF Science Matters |
| 2021 | Lucid dreamers may be able to talk to the outside world | The Economist |
| 2019 | Are Our Memories Real? | Metaphysical Milkshake Podcast with Rainn Wilson and Reza Aslan |
| 2015 | BBC World Service News Hour | BBC World Service News Hour |
References
edit- ^ "Ken A. Paller". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2022-12-06.
- ^ Paller, K. A.; Kutas, M.; Mayes, A. R. (1987). "Neural correlates of encoding in an incidental learning paradigm". Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology. 67 (4): 360–371. doi:10.1016/0013-4694(87)90124-6. ISSN 0013-4694. PMID 2441971.
- ^ Paller, Ken A.; Wagner, Anthony D. (2002). "Observing the transformation of experience into memory". Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 6 (2): 93–102. doi:10.1016/s1364-6613(00)01845-3. ISSN 1364-6613.
- ^ Gonsalves, B.; Paller, K. A. (2000). "Neural events that underlie remembering something that never happened". Nature Neuroscience. 3 (12): 1316–1321. doi:10.1038/81851. ISSN 1097-6256. PMID 11100153.
- ^ Gonsalves, Brian; Reber, Paul J.; Gitelman, Darren R.; Parrish, Todd B.; Mesulam, M.-Marsel; Paller, Ken A. (2004). "Neural evidence that vivid imagining can lead to false remembering". Psychological Science. 15 (10): 655–660. doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00736.x. ISSN 0956-7976. PMID 15447635.
- ^ Paller, Ken A.; Voss, Joel L.; Westerberg, Carmen E. (2009). "Investigating the Awareness of Remembering". Perspectives on Psychological Science: A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science. 4 (2): 185–199. doi:10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01118.x. ISSN 1745-6916. PMID 26158944.
- ^ Voss, Joel L.; Lucas, Heather D.; Paller, Ken A. (2012). "More than a feeling: Pervasive influences of memory without awareness of retrieval". Cognitive neuroscience. 3 (0): 193–207. doi:10.1080/17588928.2012.674935. ISSN 1758-8928. PMC 4385384. PMID 24171735.
- ^ Paller, Ken A.; Creery, Jessica D.; Schechtman, Eitan (2021-01-04). "Memory and Sleep: How Sleep Cognition Can Change the Waking Mind for the Better". Annual review of psychology. 72: 123–150. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010419-050815. ISSN 0066-4308. PMC 7983127. PMID 32946325.
- ^ Rudoy, John D.; Voss, Joel L.; Westerberg, Carmen E.; Paller, Ken A. (2009-11-20). "Strengthening Individual Memories by Reactivating them During Sleep". Science (New York, N.Y.). 326 (5956): 1079. doi:10.1126/science.1179013. ISSN 0036-8075. PMC 2990343. PMID 19965421.
- ^ Paller, Ken A. (2017). "Sleeping in a Brave New World: Opportunities for Improving Learning and Clinical Outcomes through Targeted Memory Reactivation". Current Directions in Psychological Science. 26 (6): 532–537. doi:10.1177/0963721417716928. ISSN 0963-7214. PMC 5798898. PMID 29422722.
- ^ Hu, Xiaoqing; Cheng, Larry Y.; Chiu, Man Hey; Paller, Ken A. (2020). "Promoting memory consolidation during sleep: A meta-analysis of targeted memory reactivation". Psychological bulletin. 146 (3): 218–244. doi:10.1037/bul0000223. ISSN 0033-2909. PMC 7144680. PMID 32027149.
- ^ Konkoly, Karen R.; Appel, Kristoffer; Chabani, Emma; Mangiaruga, Anastasia; Gott, Jarrod; Mallett, Remington; Caughran, Bruce; Witkowski, Sarah; Whitmore, Nathan W.; Mazurek, Christopher Y.; Berent, Jonathan B.; Weber, Frederik D.; Türker, Başak; Leu-Semenescu, Smaranda; Maranci, Jean-Baptiste (2021-04-12). "Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep". Current biology : CB. 31 (7): 1417–1427.e6. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2021.01.026. ISSN 0960-9822. PMC 8162929. PMID 33607035.