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Why Your Brain Needs Sleep
The Better Sleep Council Delivers The Sleep Think Link

Neurologists Say Sleep Improves Memory And Learning

Alexandria, VA -- Recent research reveals that "sleeping on it" is more than just a good idea. In fact, neuroscientists now say that sleep is absolutely critical for key brain functions including learning, memory and performance. A new survey of 1,000 adults conducted by Bruskin/Goldring Research for the Better Sleep Council (BSC), found that few understand the important role sleep plays in normal, daily brain functions and many actually short-circuit their brain power by getting too little sleep.

Neurological and sleep experts concur that sleep is essential for the brain to function optimally. However, BSC's survey reveals a disturbing finding. Although the majority of those polled report that their typical weekday requires mental alertness, fully one in three say they don't get enough sleep. What's more, 53 percent of respondents admit their mental capabilities suffer when they lose sleep. The implication: millions of sleep-deprived adults are struggling to accomplish daily tasks in a diminished state, coping with dulled thinking and impaired concentration.

Clearing the brain's cluttered desktop

In recently published studies, neuroscientists found that sleep allows the brain to take care of the business of memory consolidation.

Drs. Bruce McNaughton and Matthew Wilson, the principle researchers in animal studies conducted at the University of Arizona, link deep sleep to memory. "When you're asleep, he brain is processing information accumulated when you were awake. It's no longer storing new input; it's organizing information," explains Dr. McNaughton. "Your brain is like a cluttered desktop at the end of the day. At night, when you're asleep and no more information can be put on the desk -- or in your brain -- your brain can then file away the information."

According to Dr. Wilson, sleep is essential for memory formation. When a person is sleep-deprived, the brain's ability to move information from temporary memory to long-term stores is impaired. As a result, the information is lost or forgotten.

In a separate study, researchers found that sleep improves people's ability to learn repetitive skills such as riding a bike or typing. Drs. Avi Karni and Dov Sagi of the Weizmann Institute in Israel tested young adults and found that day-to-day improvements in learning were directly connected to a state of vivid dreaming known as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. When the subjects were deprived on REM sleep, their learning ability was impaired.

Memory and learning experiments conducted in Canada further underscore the importance of sleep. Canadian researchers compared the performance of students cramming for an examination without sleep to classmates who slept after studying. The students who slept retained more information. "Sleep is a time when the brain can rehearse recently learned material," says James D. Walsh, Ph.D., Director of St. Luke's Hospital Sleep Medicine and Research Center. "If you're sleep-deprived, you'll remember less of newly presented information."