Sleep Makes Your Memories Stronger, and Helps With Creativity
"Sleep is making memories
stronger," says Jessica D. Payne of the University of Notre Dame, who
co-wrote the review with Elizabeth A. Kensinger of Boston College. "It
also seems to be doing something which I think is so much more interesting, and
that is reorganizing and restructuring memories."
Payne and Kensinger study what
happens to memories during sleep, and they have found that a person tends to
hang on to the most emotional part of a memory. For example, if someone is
shown a scene with an
emotional object, such as a wrecked car, in the
foreground, they're more likely to remember the emotional object than, say, the
palm trees in the background -- particularly if they're tested after a night of
sleep. They have also measured brain activity during sleep and found that
regions of the brain involved with emotion and memory consolidation are active.
"In our fast-paced society,
one of the first things to go is our sleep," Payne says. "I think
that's based on a profound misunderstanding that the sleeping brain isn't doing
anything." The brain is busy. It's not just consolidating memories, it's
organizing them and picking out the most salient information. She thinks this
is what makes it possible for people to come up with creative, new ideas.
Payne has taken the research to
heart. "I give myself an eight-hour sleep opportunity every night. I never
used to do that -- until I started seeing my data," she says. People who
say they'll sleep when they're dead are sacrificing their ability to have good
thoughts now, she says. "We can get away with less sleep, but it has a
profound effect on our cognitive abilities."
Source
: sciencedaily
