 Sleep Can Help Memory
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Oct. 9, 2003 — Want to learn a foreign language? Get a good night's sleep.
New research, published Thursday in the British science weekly Nature, has highlighted the power of sleep to strengthen and restore memory when it comes to intellectual tasks.
University of Chicago psychologists asked 24 student volunteers to recognize simple, phonetically similar words from a poor-quality speech synthesizer. They never heard the same word twice.
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The guinea pigs began with a morning session and by the end were able to improve their recognition rate by 21 percent compared to when they began. They were building on their memories of sounds to "generalize," or give themselves a guide as to the meaning of each new sound.
Those who were tested a second time 12 hours later — but who had not had a sleep — saw their accuracy improvement slump to just 10 percent.
But those who had slept in between the two tests were just as accurate as before.
And, crucially, the first group, which suffered a fall in accuracy, could recover their performance so long as they had a nap.
"Sleep can rescue memories that have spontaneously deteriorated and ... memories involving generalization can be recovered," said Karim Nader, a psychologist at Montreal's McGill University, in a commentary also published in Nature.
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