Next time you head off to bed to get a good night’s sleep, your brain’s memory bank is likely to thank you for it.

American research presented at the Australasian Sleep Conference in Adelaide yesterday showed that far from resting while people sleep, the brain uses this time to store and remember important information and discard useless details.

Associate Professor Robert Stickgold, from Harvard Medical School, said sleep played a more important role in memory processing than previously had been thought.

Professor Stickgold’s research showed that sleep not only strengthened recently formed memories, it could also blend them into networks of older memories.

He said the brain also used sleep to sift through memories such as scenes people saw that day, to remember the important “emotional” memories and dismiss unimportant ones.

And when people were given a task to finger-tap out a difficult-to-remember code and then sent home to “sleep on it”, the next morning they were 15-20 per cent faster at performing the task and had 30-40 per cent fewer errors.

“So while you’re sleeping, your brain is actually improving on the memory that you formed while you were awake, and if people don’t get enough sleep, say more than six hours, then you won’t see that improvement,” Professor Stickgold said.

Source: The West Australian
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