Memories Get Stronger When You Sleep

Scientists knew that sleep makes memories stronger, by fixating them in the brain and allowing an easy access later on, but a new research found out the reason why we sleep almost a third of our lives, and why do our bodies need so much sleep.

Jessica D. Payne of the University of Notre Dame, and Elizabeth A. Kensinger of Boston College, found that sleep also seems to reorganize memories, selecting emotional details and rearranging memories in a way that produces new and creative ideas.

The two researchers wanted to see what happened to memories when a person sleeps, so after measuring brain activity, they found out that the brain regions involved with emotion and memory consolidation were active and concluded that people tend to hang on to the most emotional part of a memory.

They explained that if someone is shown a scene with an emotional object, like a wrecked car for example, they will more likely remember the emotional object than, what was in the background of the image, and this is especially true if they're tested after a night's sleep.

Payne said that “sleep is making memories stronger, [and] it also seems to be doing something which I think is so much more interesting, and that is reorganizing and restructuring memories.

“In our fast-paced society, one of the first things to go is our sleep,” Payne added.

“I think that's based on a profound misunderstanding that the sleeping brain isn't doing anything."

When we sleep the brain does not stop, on the contrary, it remains busy by consolidating memories, organizing them and picking out the most important information.

It is also possible that this could be actually be the thing that gives people new and creative ideas.

Payne is taking this research very seriously and says that “I give myself an eight-hour sleep opportunity every night.

“I never used to do that—until I started seeing my data," she explains.

People do not want to believe that they actually need a good night's sleep, and have no idea that they risk having cognitive problems.

This research was presented in an article appearing in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.