Want to Learn Better? Sleep on it. Literally.

I am tired. So tired. How about you? Probably the same I would imagine. Like me, maybe it is a baby or infant that keeps you up. Or shift work. To make things worse, we go and do things that interfere with our regular sleep cycle, like stare at a computer screen just before bed. Many of us then turn to some form of sleep aiding medication to make up the difference. And yet, do sleeping pills help us to feel restored and rested the next morning or just hung over?

We know that not getting enough sleep effects us cognitively. Sleep deprivation impacts brain cell communication. This can lead to temporary mental lapses and that effect our visual perception as well as our memory. And areas of our brain can literally be dozing during the day. The end result is we cannot think or concentrate very well. Not good.

But how is our ability to learn impacted by sleep? What happens to our memories when we sleep?

Sleep is not the passive time that you may have thought it was. There is a lot going on in our brains while we sleep. The stage of sleep we are in also affects how active our brains are. Sleep allows our brains to go through a routine synaptic maintenance cycle each night.

Sleep helps us to retain what we learn each day. Each night, our brains replay the experiences and learning opportunities that we went through that day. It is like we are going through the exact same things again while sleeping that we did when we were awake. This is repetition and it is that repetition that strengthens the pathways for certain memories to be remembered. It is also responsible for forgetting too as less important memories are not reinforced as much during sleep.

These adaptive changes may occur during very short and repetitive brain waves called sleep spindles. During these sleep spindles, certain pathways are most likely activated in dendrites, the part of a nerve cell like a train track along which electrical impulses travel, leading to the reinforcement process of some memories.

So the value of good night’s sleep, according to this study, is our brains show the capacity to undergo neuroplastic change, something they apparently do not do during the day. Further, according to the same study, is that reinforcement and consolidation of memories seems to only happen in the third stage of non-REM sleep, known as slow-wave or deep sleep. That is the kind of sleep we are in when we seem oblivious to anything happening in the external environment around us. Children experience far more deep sleep while adults experience less, about 15% of sleeping time.

And here’s a creepy yet cool, kind of Total Recall piece about sleep and memory formation. Using mice, researchers from the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris, France hope to be able to add positive thoughts to negative memories. Using electrodes, the researchers are able to identify cells in the brains of mice that were active during the exploration of a space. They can also see the same cells being active when the mice sleep. This is the mice getting the repetition necessary to strengthen that memory for the long-term. By stimulating the reward centre of the mice when these cells are active during sleep, they will be able to get the mice to form good memories of that particular location that they had explored when awake. In this way, mice should then return to an area they explored where they had a negative experience, like receiving an electric shock. Or so the theory goes. Keep your eyes peeled for the results. The overall goal is to help individuals with conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder or to help elderly individuals who naturally experience age-related forgetfulness.

And who knows, if you are a student, for example, who did not get enough sleep during final exams, subsequently bombing them, in the future you might simply be able to get that bad memory removed and forget all about it.