By Tolani Abubakar
It is said that when you learn something new, the best way to remember it is to sleep on it, rest
your head for it to be calm. That’s because sleeping helps strengthen memories you’ve formed
throughout the day. It also helps to link new memories to earlier ones. One might even come up with creative new ideas while you are asleep.
What happens to memories in your brain while you sleep? And how does lack of sleep affect your ability to learn and remember? There have been gathering of clues about the complex relationship between sleep and memory by NIH-funded scientist. Their findings might eventually lead to new approaches/ways to help students/young children learn or help old people hold onto memories as they grow old. Dr. Matthew Walker, a sleep scientist at the University of California, Berkeley once said that “We’ve learned that sleep before learning helps prepare your brain for initial formation of memories”. When you sleep off, the brain cycles through different phases of sleep, including light sleep, deep sleep, and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and this happens when dreaming often occurs. The cycles repeat about every 90 minutes.
The non-REM stages of sleep seem to prime the brain for good learning the next day. If you haven’t slept, your ability to learn new things could drop by up to 40%. “You can’t pull an all-nighter and still learn effectively,” Walker says. Lack of sleep affects a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is key for making new memories.
You accumulate many memories, moment by moment, while you’re awake. Most will be forgotten during the day. “When we first form memories, they’re in a very raw and fragile form,” says sleep expert Dr. Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School.
But when you doze off, “sleep seems to be a privileged time when the brain goes back through recent memories and decides both what to keep and what not to keep,” Stickgold explains. “During a night of sleep, some memories are strengthened.” Research has shown that memories of certain procedures, like playing a melody on a piano, can actually improve
while you’re asleep. It a thing we all know that sleep patterns tend to change as we grow older. Unfortunately, the deep memory-strengthening stages of sleep start to reduce in our late 30s. A study by Walker and colleagues found that adults older than 60 had a 70% loss of deep sleep compared to young adults ages 18 to 25. Older adults had a harder time remembering things the next day, and memory impairment was linked to reductions in deep sleep. The researchers are now exploring options for enhancing deep stages of sleep in this older age group. For younger people, especially students, Stickgold offers additional advice that, “Realize that the sleep you get the night after you study is at least as important as the sleep you get the night before you study.” When it comes to sleep and memory, he says, “you get very little benefit from cutting corners”.