Sleep Has An Effect On Our Memory Retention

by Nikhil Sundaram    August 14, 2008

Sleep has been found to play an important role in making us remember and forget.This is done as sleep helps the brain to preserve memories that evoke the greatest emotional responses and filtering out the rest.

The study was conducted Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre (BIDMC).Jessica Payne,the study's co-author is a Harvard University research fellow.According to her,the study shows that sleep's role in emotional memory preservation is more than just mechanistic."In order to preserve what it deems most important, the brain makes a tradeoff, strengthening the memory's emotional core and obscuring its neutral background."

Although many studies have been conducted previously they have all focussed on the role that sleep plays in procedural memory.They demonstrated that the consolidation of procedural skills(playing the piano for example) is greatly enhanced after a bout of sleep.But this study tries to analyse the effect of sleep on episodic memories - in particular, those with emotional resonance.

"Emotional memories usually contain highly charged elements - for example, the car that sideswiped us on the ride home - along with other elements that are only tangentially related to the emotion, such as the name of the street we were travelling on or what store we'd just passed," explained co-author Elizabeth Kensinger, assistant professor at Boston College.

This study has been based on a survey of 88 college students and has appeared in the August issue of Psychological Science.
 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Rate It:

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5