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Abstract Sleep spindles are a physiological marker of off-line memory consolidation. In young adults, sleep spindles are preferentially responsive to encoded information that is tagged as having future relevance. Older adults, on the other hand, show reduced capacity for future simulation and alterations in sleep physiology. Healthy young adults (n = 38) and older adults (n = 28) completed an adaptation night, followed by two in-laboratory polysomnography nights, in which they mentally simulated future events or remembered past events, recorded via written descriptions. We quantified the degree of future/past thinking using linguistic analysis of time orientation. In young adults, greater future thinking was linked to greater spindle density, even when controlling for gender, age, and word count (rp = .370, p = .028). The opposite was true for older adults, such that greater future thinking was associated with reduced spindle density (rp = −.431, p = .031). These patterns were selective to future thinking (not observed for past thinking). The collective findings implicate an impaired interaction between future relevance tagging and sleep physiology as a mechanism by which aging compromises sleep-dependent cognitive processing. 

Many people listen to music for hours every day, often near bedtime. We investigated whether music listening affects sleep, focusing on a rarely explored mechanism: involuntary musical imagery (earworms). In Study 1 ( N = 199, mean age = 35.9 years), individuals who frequently listen to music reported persistent nighttime earworms, which were associated with worse sleep quality. In Study 2 ( N = 50, mean age = 21.2 years), we randomly assigned each participant to listen to lyrical or instrumental-only versions of popular songs before bed in a laboratory, discovering that instrumental music increased the incidence of nighttime earworms and worsened polysomnography-measured sleep quality. In both studies, earworms were experienced during awakenings, suggesting that the sleeping brain continues to process musical melodies. Study 3 substantiated this possibility by showing a significant increase in frontal slow oscillation activity, a marker of sleep-dependent memory consolidation. Thus, some types of music can disrupt nighttime sleep by inducing long-lasting earworms that are perpetuated by spontaneous memory-reactivation processes.