Studies Suggest Sleep Helps Memory

What is the easiest way to strengthen your memories? Sleep!

WebMD Medical News reported at the end of April that Jeffrey Ellenbogen, MD, a neurologist and fellow in sleep research at Harvard Medical School, has found some interesting connections between sleep and memory.

"This is the first study to show that sleep protects memories from interference," Ellenbogen says in an American Academy of Neurology news release.

"These results provide important insights into how the sleeping brain interacts with memories: It appears to strengthen them," he says. "Perhaps, then, sleep disorders might worsen memory problems seen in dementia."

Ellenbogen's research shows that those who were asked to memorize word pairs and then were distracted by another set of word pairs were able to repeat the first words more accurately after a good night’s rest.

That is to say, “sleeping on it” prevented a distraction to the memory task, and could be useful for understanding how memory works.

So does this mean that we should all commit something to memory and then take a nap? Maybe!