Reactivating Memories During Sleep Protects Them

Scientists now believe that memories can be protected more easily from interferences by reactivating them during sleep. For example, if you want to remember a song, you could listen to it while awake, and then someone would play it back to you during sleep. This would ensure the memory is firm.

Investigations have demonstrated over the years that the human memory is prone to making errors, and also to conditioning. This means that people could be easily made to believe that something which did not actually happen is true.

But experts say that this only happens with memories that are formed when a person is awake exclusively. If the memory in question is made to take deeper roots by reactivating it during sleep, then those seeking to manipulate it will find it considerably more difficult.

The new research was carried out by scientists in Germany and Switzerland, and was reported online in the January 23 issue of the esteemed scientific journal Nature Neuroscience.

According to University of California in San Diego (UCSD) cognitive neuroscientist Sara Mednick, who was not a part of the new study, it would seem that the brain simply handles information differently while asleep, than when awake.

Using these newfound data, therapists working with trauma or abuse victims could develop new methods of overwriting or completely removing bad memories and information from their patients' minds, Science News reports.

One possible approach to doing this may be replacing bad memories with new ones as the patient is awake, and then proceed to consolidate them while the person being treated takes a short nap.

Brain-imaging technologies that researchers used on the brains of test participants revealed that different regions of the brain were involved in memory formation during sleep.

When it came to memory replays, the awaken brain called on one of its areas. When the patient was sleeping, a completely different region was called upon. The research team believes that reactivating the memories during a nap speeds up their processing.

When people sleep, data that's worth remembering is moved from the short-term memory in the hippocampus to long-term memory of the cortex. The scientists behind the new study believe that reactivating memories as this happens speeds up the process, and makes it more stable.