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Deep sleep enhances memory

It’s a truism that getting a good night will help you function better the next day, but a study by out of Holland done by Ysbrand van der Werf and his colleagues, published in Nature Neuroscience, explicitly shows effects of differing types and amount of sleep.  Most clearly they show that uninterrupted deep sleep greatly improves the brain’s perfomance for storage and recall of memories.

Comparing subjects who had substantial uninterrupted sleep with those that had equal amounts of sleep but were prodded away periodically, recall of images day over day was significantly impacted.  Given scans of the hippocampus, their study suggests that instead of merely affecting recall it’s more likely encoding of memories is significantly affected by sleep quality.  So the better your sleep, the more your brain will store for later retrieval.

While the concept of improved mental performance after good sleep isn’t overly original, evidence that it impairs storage of memories rather than recall, is fairly novel.

Thanks to the BPS blog for the link.

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