Losing sleep for any reason cannot be justified and getting a good night’s sleep affects our memory and can result in stress, lack of concentration, mood swings, lower motivation and fatigue.
To steer clear of different sleep disorders it’s important that we get proper sleep. More than seventy five percent of people suffering from depression result from some kind of sleep problem.
In today’s times one of the most common problems is sleep deprivation. Better Sleep Council surveyed a thousand adults and discovered that more than 25 percent of them agreed to not getting proper sleep at night.
We know how fatigue and sleep deprivation can affect our mental and physical health. Whether it’s an interview or exam, we are always told to get a good night of rest before the big performance. But there is more to sleep than that. It’s not just about fatigue and good mental health.
Getting a good night of sleep after a long day of learning helps consolidate memory formation of the prior day. Albeit sleep deprivation does or does not affect new memory formation is still a question mark.
Very recently Harvard published a report which says that sleep may be critically important not only for solidification of memories from the current day, but also in preparing the brain for next-day memory formation.
Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA claims that without proper good night’s sleep deficit in the ability to form new human memories is very likely.
Evidence from research indicates that sleep after doing learning (learning that needs to be remembered or absorbed and not just a pleasure or casual activity) is important for the consolidation of human memory.
The unanswered question or what the sleep specialists are working on is, whether sleep before learning is equally essential for the initial formation of new memories or not.
Their report says that deprivation of one night of sleep can result into significant deficit in hippocampal activity during the process of episodic memory encoding, resulting in sub-standard and reduced subsequent retention.
The research also found and reported that unique prefrontal regions decide the success of encoding for both type of individuals, i.e. sleep-deprived individuals and those who sleep normally.
The result somewhat suggests that sleep before learning is critical in preparing our brain for the coming-day’s memory formation-which is an issue most of us will or already are worrying about considering the increasing erosion of sleep span.
Once the research whether a good night’s sleep affects our memory is completed, it will be very interesting to find things like, can losing sleep affect the memory formation a week later or is this just a short-term consequence?
Can amounts of sleep deprivation have any relation or impact on memory etc?
