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.
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) into longer term storage while counting the proverbial zzzz's.
