Question: You mentioned how deep sleep tends to be bad for memory for those with epilepsy. What advice would you give to improve the memories of those with epilepsy?

Kathryn Atherton answered on 10 Jun 2019:

My work in this area was specifically with people with transient epileptic amnesia (a subtype of epilepsy). More research is needed to understand the mechanism before any interventions are developed. One way of doing this would be to use sounds to manipulate the slow waves that appear in deep sleep. If it is the slow waves that are having a negative impact on memory for these patients, then suppressing the slow waves should improve memory and enhancing them should have a negative impact on memory.