It is surprising news bound to bring joy to students studying for exams everywhere. The best way to memorise newly-acquired knowledge is to go to sleep, scientists believe. Researchers in Germany found that the brain is better during sleep than during wakefulness at resisting attempts to scramble or corrupt a recent memory. Their study, published in Nature Neuroscience, provides new insights into the hugely complex process by which we store and retrieve deliberately acquired information -- learning, in short.
Fresh memories, stored temporarily in a region of the brain called the hippocampus, do not gel immediately, earlier research showed. It was also known that reactivation of those memories soon after learning plays a crucial role in their transfer to more permanent storage in the brain's 'hard drive', the neocortex. During wakefulness, however, this period of reactivation renders the memories more fragile. Learning a second poem at this juncture, for example, will likely make it harder to commit the first one to deep memory.
Lead author Dr Susanne Diekelmann said: 'Reactivation of memories had completely different effects on the state of wakefulness and sleep. 'Based on brain imaging data, we suggest the reason for this unexpected result is that already during the first few minutes of sleep, the transfer from hippocampus to neocortex has been initiated.' After only 40 minutes of sleep, significant chunks of memory were already 'downloaded' and stored where they 'could no longer be disrupted by new information that is encoded in the hippocampus', she explained.
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