Sleep and Memory

Memory and learning occur in three stages: acquisition, consolidation and recall. 

Acquisition is the stage in which you learn and understand new information, whether this is the taste of your grandmother’s cookies or the steps to solve a quadratic equation. 

Consolidation is the step in which your brain stores the information, incorporating it into your existing knowledge and,

Recall is the step in which you access information and memories that have been stored.

When we sleep, our brains take the information that we have learned throughout the day and store it carefully in the neurons and cells that fill our brains. Slow wave sleep, which is the deep sleep during which we become rested, is particularly important to the consolidation process in processing and storing new facts. REM sleep, the deep sleep phase in which we dream, is when emotional memories are consolidated.

What happens to your memories if you are not getting enough deep sleep? Prior studies have found that we do not store memories as effectively and thus may have trouble recalling information, even with diligent study. 

However, many people feel that they must give up a certain amount of sleep in order to learn. After all, you cannot acquire information (or in scientific terms, go through memory acquisition) in your sleep, can you? According to new research, learning in your sleep may actually be a possibility.

Several prior studies have looked at whether it is possible to learn while you are asleep. Researchers in Germany, for example, gave study participants a group of Dutch words to study late at night. One group was then kept awake to continue studying, while the other slept while listening to the words play softly. When the sleeping group was awoken, both groups were given a test on the Dutch words they had learned. The people who slept scored higher

Many people think of sleep as nonproductive time, a simple biological necessity. However, there are several indications that it can be a valuable time for learning. When people are in deep slow-wave sleep, they produce a type of brain wave called theta waves, which are seen when we are awake and actively learning. We may be able to learn new foreign languages or a wide variety of new information if exposed to information in the right way while we sleep. These new studies suggest that being awake is not essential to learning and building memories.

In addition, sleep helps people to pay attention throughout their day, acquiring more information to be later consolidated in slumber. The health effects of sleeping well are also undeniable. If you want to perform and learn up to your best potential, missing sleep is not the answer.

https://www.chronobiology.com/learning-in-your-sleep-reality-or-just-a-dream/