Sleeping helps remembering

[hallenrm]

A team of research scientists from Harvard Medical school, University of Oregon and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, have found new evidence that sleep improves the brain's ability to remember information. Their findings demonstrate that memories of recently learned word pairs are improved if sleep intervenes between learning and testing and that this benefit is most pronounced when memory is challenged by competing information.

 

The researchers studied the influence of sleep on declarative memory in healthy, college-aged adults. The results demonstrated a robust effect: Compared to participants who did not sleep during the trials, those who slept between learning and testing were able to recall more of the original words they had learned earlier. The beneficial influence of sleep was particularly marked when participants were presented with the challenge of "interference"--competing word-pair information--just prior to testing. A follow-up group further demonstrated that this sleep benefit for memory persists over the subsequent waking day. This work clarifies and extends previous study of sleep and memory by demonstrating that sleep does not just passively and transiently protect memories; rather, sleep plays an active role in memory consolidation.

 

More current biology

[Boerseun]

Could be. Although, I have found that if I sleep only a few minutes a day longer than I'm supposed to, my mind turns to candy floss for the rest of the day and I cannot remember anything quickly or function properly for the rest of the day... weird.

[hallenrm]

Your experience again highlights the fact, that the results of so called scientific investigations do not always reveal the whole truth!

[ronthepon]

Its true. I always believed this to be a fact taken for granted

[InfiniteNow]

Sleep is food for the brain. While it's not yet completely understood, some speculate that the synaptic connections undergo reorganization while the body is shut down for sleep, and that memories transition from the immediately available conscious buffer (I just made that term up... :hihi: ) into longer term storage while counting the proverbial zzzz's.