According to a study, proper sleep can boost our remembrance power

While getting proper sleep has been proven to play a critical role in our health, in a new study, researchers report that sleep may also help people to learn continuously through their lifetime. The study led by researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine was published in the journal eLife.

In the study, researchers used computational models capable of simulating different brain states, such as sleep and awake, to examine how sleep consolidates newly encoded memories and prevents damage to old memories.

“The brain is very busy when we sleep, repeating what we have learned during the day. Sleep helps reorganise memories and presents them in the most efficient way. Our findings suggest that memories are dynamic, not static. In other words, memories, even old memories, are not final. Sleep constantly updates them,” said Maksim Bazhenov, PhD, lead author of the study and professor of medicine at UC San Diego.

“We predict that during the sleep cycle, both old and new memories are spontaneously replayed, which prevents forgetting and increases recall performance.” Bazhenov said that memory replay during sleep plays a protective role against forgetting by allowing the same populations of neurons to store multiple interfering memories.

“We learn many new things on a daily basis and those memories compete with old memories. To accommodate all memories, we need to sleep.” For example, imagine learning how to navigate to a parking lot by going left at one-stop sign and right at one traffic light. The