{"id":10595,"date":"2020-07-11T19:15:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-11T23:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=10595"},"modified":"2020-07-17T15:00:24","modified_gmt":"2020-07-17T19:00:24","slug":"sleep-and-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/sleep-and-memory\/","title":{"rendered":"Sleep and Memory: The Surprising Connection"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How are sleep and memory related? Does lack of sleep hurt your memory, and can more sleep improve it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sleep and memory are closely linked. When you miss out on sleep, your memory function can be impaired. Sleep and memory are so closely connected that you may even experience chronic memory loss as a result of a lack of sleep. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

How Sleep and Memory Work<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

What do sleep and memory have to do with each other? Do the effects of sleep on memory have a lot to do with your daily life?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Science says yes. Getting good sleep improves your brain in these ways:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1) Sleep improves long-term factual recall<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your brain stories different memories in different places. The hippocampus stores short-term memory with a limited capacity; the cortex stores long-term memory in a large storage bank. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The slow-wave, pulsating NREM sleep moves facts from the hippocampus to the cortex. This has two positive effects: 1) it secure memories for the long term, and 2) it clears out short-term memory to make room for new information and improves future learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Have you ever woken up recalling facts that you couldn\u2019t have recalled before sleeping? Sleep may make corrupted memories accessible again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While good sleep improves memory, sleep deprivation can prevent new memories from being formed<\/strong>. This might be partially because the hippocampus becomes less functional with less sleep, partially because lack of NREM sleep prevents solidifying of new memories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, making up a sleep deficit later doesn\u2019t help recover a previous days\u2019 memory – if you lost it, you\u2019ve lost it. That’s why sleep and memory are so important. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

2) Sleep prunes memories worth forgetting<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sleep doesn\u2019t preserve all memories equally strongly – somehow, the brain knows which memories are useful and worth preserving, and which ones are useless and OK discarding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Experimentally, this has been shown in experiments where subjects are given a list of words and instructed which words to remember and which to forget. Students who get to take a nap show stronger memories for the appropriate words, compared to students who don\u2019t nap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3) Sleep increases \u201cmuscle memory\u201d or motor task proficiency<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You might struggle with a motor task (like playing a tough sequence on piano), but after sleeping, be able to play it flawlessly. Sleep seems to transfer motor memories to subconscious habits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sleep deprivation also worsens general athletic performance: getting less sleep decreases your aerobic capacity, time to exhaustion, and recovery; and it increases risk of injury and lactic acid generation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The above benefits generally occur in NREM sleep<\/strong>, which is concentrated in the beginning of sleep. In experiments, participants who have NREM sleep disrupted perform worse than those who have REM sleep disrupted. Consider this as one of the effects of sleep on memory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few last scientific details:<\/p>\n\n\n\n