Good reflection: Hidden in plain sight - View of Scheveningen Sands

Source: Restoration reveals hidden whale in 17th-century Dutch painting

Photograph: Fitzwilliam Museum

Photograph: Fitzwilliam Museum

It was always a bit of a puzzle what the people clustered on the sands, or peering down from the dunes, were actually looking at on a bleak stretch of windswept Dutch beach. The startling truth has just been revealed, after the conservator Shan Kuang took a delicate scalpel to a painting which has been in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge for the past 140 years. She first uncovered a baffling figure of man apparently standing in mid air, and then gradually revealed that he was standing on the great hillock of a beached whale, washed up on the shallows.

The varnish of the beach scene had yellowed and become unsightly, but as she removed it the mid-air man appeared, beside what appeared to be a sail. She could also see that a stretch of the sea was clearly a later addition. There was a long debate among the experts about the potential risk of damaging the painting before she proceeded to remove the overpainting, using a scalpel and solvents, working on tiny areas under a microscope.

What a pleasant turn of event for the art world, indeed. To me, this is a bit like describing the therapy process: we work on integrating and developing our better self, and sometimes in the process, we may be surprised to find the beauty and wisdom that may have eluded us for years.

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Research debrief: Sleep promotes skill learning retention in the brain

Source: Sleep promotes branch-specific formation of dendritic spines after learning (Yang et al., 2014)

How sleep helps learning and memory remains unknown. We report in mouse motor cortex that sleep after motor learning promotes the formation of postsynaptic dendritic spines on a subset of branches of individual layer V pyramidal neurons. New spines are formed on different sets of dendritic branches in response to different learning tasks and are protected from being eliminated when multiple tasks are learned. Neurons activated during learning of a motor task are reactivated during subsequent non–rapid eye movement sleep, and disrupting this neuronal reactivation prevents branch-specific spine formation. These findings indicate that sleep has a key role in promoting learning-dependent synapse formation and maintenance on selected dendritic branches, which contribute to memory storage.

What it means: To extrapolate from this research on mice, during non-rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep (based on an 8-hour sleep cycle), your brain may actively "remember" specific skill learning you have acquired earlier during the day. Disrupting this period of sleep may prevent the turning of this "learning" into "memory."

What you need to know:

• Neuron connections are our underlying brain processes.
• Sleep cycles between REM stage and non-REM stages. In REM stage, you're hard to wake but your brain wave appears as active as when you're awake. Non-REM stages, considered the "deeper sleep" stages, have "slow waves," involved in strengthening learning memory.

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