During sleep, your brain can learn a new piece of information and even store it for later, so that it pops up when you need it, found a new study carried out by researchers at theUniversity of York and Harvard Medical School.
The team also discovered that sleep helps people remember new words easier and allows them to enrich their 'mental lexicon' with new vocabulary.
For the experiments, the study volunteers learned new words in the evening and were tested right afterward.
The team also discovered that sleep helps people remember new words easier and allows them to enrich their 'mental lexicon' with new vocabulary.
For the experiments, the study volunteers learned new words in the evening and were tested right afterward.
They slept over night at the lab while their brain activity was recorded using an electroencephalogram, and the next morning underwent another test.
The results proved that the subjects could remember more words than they did just after they had learned them, and they could also recognize them faster, which supports the theory that sleep has strengthened the new memories.
For the control group however, things went a little differently: they were trained in the morning and were re-tested in the evening, without getting any sleep in between, and their results were much weaker.
The researchers examined the brainwaves of sleep volunteers and saw that deep sleep or slow-wave sleep, helped more in strengthening new memories, than REM sleep (light sleep) did.
Another thing that the researchers tested was whether the new words had been integrated with already existing knowledge in the mental lexicon, and doing so, they discovered the importance of sleep spindles in the brain.
Sleep spindles are short but very intense bursts of brain activity which occur during the information transfer between the hippocampus and the neocortex (hippocampus memories are stored away from other memories, and the neocortex memories are connected to existing knowledge).
Participants who had more sleep spindles during the night made better connections between the new words and the others in their mental lexicon.
“We suspected from previous work that sleep had a role to play in the reorganization of new memories, but this is the first time we've really been able to observe it in action, and understand the importance of spindle activity in the process,” said co-author of the paper, Professor Gareth Gaskell, of the University of York's Department of Psychology.
These results are another confirmation of the importance of sleep in learning new things.
The study was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
The results proved that the subjects could remember more words than they did just after they had learned them, and they could also recognize them faster, which supports the theory that sleep has strengthened the new memories.
For the control group however, things went a little differently: they were trained in the morning and were re-tested in the evening, without getting any sleep in between, and their results were much weaker.
The researchers examined the brainwaves of sleep volunteers and saw that deep sleep or slow-wave sleep, helped more in strengthening new memories, than REM sleep (light sleep) did.
Another thing that the researchers tested was whether the new words had been integrated with already existing knowledge in the mental lexicon, and doing so, they discovered the importance of sleep spindles in the brain.
Sleep spindles are short but very intense bursts of brain activity which occur during the information transfer between the hippocampus and the neocortex (hippocampus memories are stored away from other memories, and the neocortex memories are connected to existing knowledge).
Participants who had more sleep spindles during the night made better connections between the new words and the others in their mental lexicon.
“We suspected from previous work that sleep had a role to play in the reorganization of new memories, but this is the first time we've really been able to observe it in action, and understand the importance of spindle activity in the process,” said co-author of the paper, Professor Gareth Gaskell, of the University of York's Department of Psychology.
These results are another confirmation of the importance of sleep in learning new things.
The study was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
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