Research suggest while we are peacefully asleep our brains are hard at work strengthening memories and solving problems. Sleep not only strengthens memories it lets us sift thru new data keeping what’s important discarding what is not.
A good night sleep make memories resistant to interference allowing effective recall.
Until the mid 1950s some scientist thought the brain shut down when we slept. A German psychologist name Hermann Ebbinghaus had evidence of the brain’s sleep function as early as 1885.
The brain acquires information when you are awake processes it when you sleep
In 1953 researchers at the University Of Chicago discovered during sleep our brains are very active. Our sleep cycle follows a 90 minute cycle in and out of R.E.M. sleep.( Rapid Eye Movement the dream process) The effects of sleep on memory is not limited to stabilization, the brain may be dissecting and remembering the most intricate details. Objects with strong emotional value were better remembered. Matthew P. Walker Of Harvard Medical School demonstrated that when subjects typed complicated sequences on a keyboard got much better after sleeping between practices.
Sleep inspires insight
To understand how this works it helps to review a few memory basics. Once encoded information enter our brain it marks the beginning of a long process to becoming a stabilized memory. Memories are created by altering the strengths between thousands of neurons, causing certain patterns to occur. During sleep the brain reactivates these patterns of neural activity as they were performed during consciousness, strengthening the memories by long term association. Cells that fire together work together locking the pattern in place for future recall. We are able to get by with as little as six hours of sleep a night, but eight hours is better for memory optimization.
A body at rest equals a mind in motion
In addition to the amazing effects on memory study also shows that sleep facilitates active analysis. Enabling the brain to actively solve problems introduced by new memories.
In 1865 an organic chemist named Friedrich August Kekule’ had a very strange dream, about a snake forming a circle biting his own tail. As the story goes he had been working non-stop mapping the chemical structure of Benzene. It was this strange dream that pointed him in a new direction accurately realizing Benzene’s structure formed a perfect ring.
A Missing Piece Of The Puzzle
One puzzling question seems to remain a mystery with no possible answer. Why did we evolve in such a way that certain cognitive functions happen only in sleep?
Scientist believe evolutionary pressures for sleep existed to aid the body’s immune system and efficient use of energy. Later as higher cognitive functions developed sleep was the perfect state to service and further develop new information. Memory processing seems to be the primary function of sleep. It seems that when the body is at rest the brain shuts off all external awareness making it more efficient at processing information. What are the chemical and molecular changes that occur during this process? This question seems to be more puzzling than the first. Researchers hope with the introduction of new research methods all the pieces of the puzzle can be connected.