How good sleeping habits can improve your memory

It is no secret that good sleeping habits are important in order to maintain one’s health. Not getting enough hours of sleep can weaken the immune system, lower sex drive, cause weight gain, as well as, affect a person’s mental state. It is said that reading something right before going to sleep helps you memorize it more effectively, and it works in the opposite sense as well.

A study led by the Laboratory of Functional Neuroscience of Pablo de Olavide University (UPO) and published in the magazine Scientific Reports has evaluated the contribution of sleep to the acquisition and consolidation of memory.

The study was carried out on young adults, all of which were university students. The students were split into two groups in which, one group was allowed to sleep eight hours whilst the other group was only allowed to sleep for four hours. The following day both groups had to memorize different pairs of celebrity faces. The pairs were presented to the students four times throughout the test, so it would be possible to assess how consistent the pattern of electrical brain activity was with each of the pairs shown to the students.

It was found that when a person sleeps four hours or less per night it makes it challenging to recall new memories. This is especially relevant as most adolescents sleep less than the advised amount of hours per night. The second finding was that sleeping the normal advised amount (which is between seven to eight hours) can reverse these effects. Meaning that just because a person’s memory is weak does not mean that it cannot be recovered.

“When we recover the details of an event, part of the brain circuits that had been activated during the initial acquisition of that event are activated again,” the researchers state. The study also explains that the recovery of the memory could occur by simply taking naps, not necessarily seven hours of sleep.

Previous studies found that the greater the consistency of brain activity after repetitions a specific event, the greater the likelihood of a person being able to recall it later on. This consistency of brain activity (which therefore directly correlated to the person’s memory) was impaired for the students that only slept four hours – meaning their memory had worsened. These same students were then allowed to sleep eight hours the night after the experiment and the two control groups showed very similar results after having had the same amount of hours of sleep.

The researchers concluded that people who sleep less than the advised seven to eight hours per night have a harder time recalling new memories, but this can be reversed, to an extent, if they recuperate the hours of lost sleep by sleeping the ‘normal’ amount. However, in today’s society, lack of sleep is a very common problem affecting not only young adults, meaning that modern society probably has a worse memory than ever before.