If you want another reason to hit the snooze button and sleep in some more, a new study has show that sleeping helps us recall facts that we previously had forgotten. So curl up in those blankets for a little longer today for the sake of your memory.
Improve Your Memory Recall Using Sleep As a Learning Tool
The new research from the University of Exeter in conjunction with the Basque Center for Cognition, Brain and Language suggested that getting more sleep may increase your ability to access memories.
According to the researchers, the findings showed that sleeping may help prevent memory as well as make it easier for people to recall memories previously thought to have been forgotten. In both situations investigated in the study, participants who had forgotten information over 12 hours of being awake had been granted access to the memories after a night’s rest.
The study was published in the journal Cortex and focused on tracking memories and recalling learned information after waking.
Study Says Sleep Linked to Recalling Information
The study involved having participants learn new, fictitious words either before going to sleep or after a period of being awake. Then the subjects had to recall the fake words immediately after learning them as well as after a period of wakefulness if they learned before sleeping or a period of sleep if they learned in the opposite manner.
Researchers in the study noticed the subjects who were able to recall the words after having previously been unable to recall the words had been the ones who had slept in between learning, testing and retesting.
Nicolas Dumay, an experimental psychologist at Exeter said that the post-sleep memory boost seen in the study is in indication that sleep may help sharpen memories, providing better memory accessibility.
Dumay also cited the hippocampus, the brain structure related to emotions and memory as well as learning, as the main enabler that allows sleep to nearly double our chances of recalling memories.
More Sleep Study Needed to Help Boost Understanding
Researchers believe that sleep, in some way, helps us “rehearse” information learned over the course of the day, as long as it is deemed important.
Though the benefits of sleep on our memories has been known for some time, there needs to be more research to fully understand the vital importance sleep plays in memory accessibility, memory recall, and memory retention.
To wake up peacefully after much needed rest, SensorWake could be for you:
Need to Remember Something? Go to Sleep
No comments:
Post a Comment