Fantastic Uses of Your Own Memory

Sleep helps the mind organize its memories

The immaterial enrichment the brain loves to feast on most is an adequate night’s sleep.

Although we have the ability to learn while sleeping, we absorb much more information, experience, and strength when we’re well-rested and wide awake.

If we overdo it like modern-day Rip Van Winkles, we miss out on a lot of living, and feel increasingly unhappy and lost.

• Sleep deprivation, along with conventional eating, can leave brain cells ravaged and exhausted.
• Insufficient sleep over prolonged periods of time prompts the mind to be less definitive and to “second-guess” itself.

An informative article based on a recent study on sleep and memory follows:

Throw out the ginkgo. Forget mnemonics. New research suggests there’s a simple way to lock in new info: Sleep on it.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School in Boston asked 48 subjects to learn a list of 20 pairs of words and then tested them 12 hours later on their recall of the pairs. Some subjects were taught the words at 9 a.m., while others learned the words at 9 p.m. and then went to sleep.

The results were a wake-up call for all-night exam crammers: Subjects in the sleep group remembered 12 percent more words from the list than subjects who learned the words at 9 a.m.

Half of both groups also were asked to learn a second list of words just before testing, to study the effect of distracting information on recall. Yet again, subjects in the sleep group did better, recalling 44 percent more words than subjects in the nonsleep group.

Lead author and neurologist Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen said he believes the memory boost could be caused by the brain replaying daytime information during sleep, similar to a rehearsal. And he has some advice for sleep-deprived students.

“I tell my students that you might do OK if you cram for an exam all night long, but don’t expect that memory to last very long,” he says in an e-mail. “Sleep is important for making memories stable and strong.”

You can read the full article here: Your mother knew best: Rest helps memory recall