Lose Sleep, Fail To Form Memory

Rambo Tribble writes: 'A research team of Chinese and American scientists claim to have witnessed the mechanism by which sleep contributes to the formation of memories. Using advanced microscopy, the researchers witnessed synapses being formed in the brain of sleeping mice recently exposed to a learning task (abstract). They compared this to similarly tasked mice, that were subsequently sleep-deprived. The sleeping mice showed a marked increase in the formation of new synapses. As one researcher explained, "We thought sleep helped, but it could have been other causes, and we show it really helps to make connections and that in sleep the brain is not quiet, it is replaying what happened during the day and it seems quite important for making the connections.'''

Everyone knows why we need sleep.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

All the transactions of a session is all kept in local cache and volatile memory. Finally it has to shut all external connections off, prune, collate, compile, squash and transcribe the local cache into more permanent record. Wait, am I describing the brain? Or our wonderful IT shutting off our git repo and clearcase server everyday between 3 AM and 8 AM?

no surprise

[lagomorpha2]

How were the mice sleep deprived?

Stress has been linked to poor memory for decades. Was it that stress has caused poor sleep quality and poor memory, or is it that sleep deprivation stressed the mice which caused poor memory, or both?

Re:Any new parent could tell you that.

[Charliemopps]

It's amazing how little sleep you can get and not die.

And for about a month after both of my kids were born, I really don't remember much at all.

Same here. We adopted my son at the age of 2. I don't remember about the first 6 months other than that he was VERY upset and trying to kill us. I still have scars from the bite marks. He wouldn't sleep unless we held him and walked in circles... all night. As soon as we stopped he would wake up and bite. I always thought it was PTSD blocking it out but maybe not. :-)

Re:College

[Anonymous Coward]

My psychology professor explained that alcohol affects memory encoding. So it's not that your drunk brain failed to record memories of the previous night, but rather that your sober brain cannot decode the memories stored by the drunk brain.

His suggestion, therefore, was that if you study for a test while drunk, you should also be drunk when you write the test.