You think when you go to sleep, you just, well, sleep?
Sleep, as it turns out, is far more complicated than we thought. And the brain not only doesn’t turn off, but appears to help keep itself healthy.
The Importance of REM Sleep
We’ve all heard of REM — rapid eye movement — discovered by the late physiologists Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman at the University of Chicago in 1953. Scientific American has the story:
During REM sleep, our brain waves — the oscillating electromagnetic signals that result from large-scale brain activity — look similar to those produced while we are awake. And in subsequent decades, the late Mircea Steriade of Laval University in Quebec and other neuroscientists discovered that individual collections of neurons were independently firing in between these REM phases, during periods known as slow-wave sleep, when large populations of brain cells fire synchronously in a steady rhythm of one to four beats each second. So it became clear that the sleeping brain was not merely “resting,” either in REM sleep or in slow-wave sleep. Sleep was doing something different. Something active.
Discovering REM sleep was the first clue that sleep didn’t just help keep our bodies healthy, but our minds as well. And while many studies have been conducted on sleep since 1953, it’s only been in the last decade where we’ve begun to appreciate the complexity and importance of sleep for our minds. In 2000, researchers discovered that people that received more than 6 hours of sleep during an experiment helped improve their performance on tasks designed to tax the memory.
The key came in the discovery that participants didn’t just require REM sleep to improve their performance — they needed all that other sleep time too (what scientists call ‘slow-wave’ sleep).
How Does Memory Impact Sleep?
The long article also provides a nice description of our current understanding of how memory works:
To understand how that could be so, it helps to review a few memory basics. When we “encode” information in our brain, the newly minted memory is actually just beginning a long journey during which it will be stabilized, enhanced and qualitatively altered, until it bears only faint resemblance to its original form. Over the first few hours, a memory can become more stable, resistant to interference from competing memories. But over longer periods, the brain seems to decide what is important to remember and what is not — and a detailed memory evolves into something more like a story.
The researchers also discovered that sleep helps stabilize memories — sleep changes our memory, “making it robust and more resistant to interference in the coming day,” as the article notes.
But wait, sleep does more! It may not just stabilize our memories, it may actually help our brains process the memories, keeping the bits we need for long-term memories (especially the emotional components), and dropping the extraneous details that would clog our limited storage capacity:
Over just the past few years, a number of studies have demonstrated the sophistication of the memory processing that happens during slumber. In fact, it appears that as we sleep, the brain might even be dissecting our memories and retaining only the most salient details. […] Instead of deteriorating, memories for the emotional objects actually seemed to improve by a few percent overnight, showing about a 15 percent improvement relative to the deteriorating backgrounds. After a few more nights, one could imagine that little but the emotional objects would be left. We know this culling happens over time with real-life events, but now it appears that sleep may play a crucial role in this evolution of emotional memories.
Good Sleep Also Helps You Solve Problems Better
But wait, sleep does even more!
Even more recent research suggests that sleep helps our brain to process the information of the day and solve problems.
The upshot is that sleep is far, far more important than most of us realize and few of us appreciate. We miss it and think nothing of chopping off a few hours here or there. But the emerging research suggests that when we cut out sleep, we may be actually harming our formation of new memories for the recent past, and our ability to perform up to our usual standards. The researchers sum it up best:
As exciting findings such as these come in more and more rapidly, we are becoming sure of one thing: while we sleep, our brain is anything but inactive. It is now clear that sleep can consolidate memories by enhancing and stabilizing them and by finding patterns within studied material even when we do not know that patterns might be there. It is also obvious that skimping on sleep stymies these crucial cognitive processes: some aspects of memory consolidation only happen with more than six hours of sleep. Miss a night, and the day’s memories might be compromised — an unsettling thought in our fast-paced, sleep-deprived society.
Read the full (albeit long) article at Scientific American: Sleep on It: How Snoozing Makes You Smarter
23 comments
Interesting…
Your article is simply super..
The way of expression is fantastic..
I want to read all articles from you..
Keep it up..
Thanks,
================
AleX
Maine Treatment Centers
While I’m asleep, I think my brain is running something akin to a marathon because when I wake up, I have the solution to a creative problem that had been so vexing the day before.
Wendy Aron, author of Hide & Seek:How I Laughed at Depression, Conquered My Fears and Found Happiness
http://www.wendyaron.com
“While I’m asleep, I think my brain is running something akin to a marathon because when I wake up, I have the solution to a creative problem that had been so vexing the day before.”
I believe about the same thing actually. I can hardly sleep as is, but when I do, I either have some weird dreams where things are so out of the ordinary, I KNOW my brain is working overtime, or I wake up with answers to problems (or mind racing thoughts about new ones).
Great article. I am a new subscriber.
The brain works wonders while we are asleep, filtering out the day’s actions and thoughts into something more comprehensible for the following day. Hence the term ‘let’s sleep on it’ comes into play.
Most of my time sleeping is spent reliving memories that I rather forget and waking up trying to figure out why I am so tired.
About a year after my father’s death at age 92 1/2. I found out that he had written me out of his will. I was shocked and confused.
My father and mother had moved to my town and bought a house a mile from us. For 12 years we had my Dad into my own family’s business. Literally. He had helped us when we were first married with a business failure when my husband was young and dumb. Which we suffered through for years. We didn’t go bankrupt, instead paid the banks back for a “Dead Horse”. It was an awful time for our newly married life.
Anyway, we struggled along and eventually my parents moved to my town after I had finished up my college degree while raising 4 children.
I had another one after they moved to our state.
I thought it would be great to have my parents living close. In some aspects it was, but my father wasn’t the father of my youth. He was aging and would stay involved with our finances.
Towards the end of his life he helped us when we started a new business. But this brought more controlling behaviors from him. We eventually paid him off for helping us get into a house farther away from him and conducive to our service business which was growing.
We finally paid him back for all monies that he ever loaned to us. But not without his constant criticism of my husband and always wanting to sell the house we were in so that he could make a profit, even though he was making a profit off of us.
He finally left us alone for about a year after my 15 1/2 year old son committed suicide. My mother had had many strokes at that time that she didn’t know who’s funeral she was at.
My mother past away a year after my son’s death from a devastating stroke that paralyzed her throat and affected her frontal lobe.
Then my father showed signs of lymphoma right after her burial. I took care of my father 24/7. Until his house sold and he moved in with my sister out of state. The lymphoma came back and chemo treatment was started again with new doctors. They stopped the treatment as my dad was just too ill.
My family took on the task of cleaning out his home and moving a lot of stuff to second hand stores or a storage unit. I have 6 siblings that all lived out of state. So a lot of it was left to my husband and I.
Anyway, it took a year to realize that the writing me out of the will was done by an angry & confused father, and when it was done 2 months later he had received lump payments
from us a few months after. Thousands of dollars were paid back. But my father must have forgot about it. And in his illness he had told two of my brothers, that he forgave the debt. One brother had Power of Attorney and the other helped out with my dad’s finances before he passed.
While taking care of my father he would ask me about money and I told him we had paid him back. Anyway, before his funeral my brother showed me the will and then said, “Well there is a good thing”. He told me about how my Dad forgave the debt. So that meant to my brother and family that I didn’t owe anything to the estate and I thought that I was going to get some money.
Eight months later I found out that the will had already been dispersed. It was awful…
I couldn’t believe it. I was so shocked.
I consulted with two attorneys and they said that usually when this happens a family could come together and agree that Dad was wrong and share their inheritance, but not my family. I wrote all them a letter about them each owing me some money as I was wrongfully judged. My brother with Power of Attorney assured me that they all care for me and think nothing bad about me because I was written out of the will. I wrote him back and told him I wrote the letter to inform everyone that Dad was wrong and I deserved my inheritance.
My brother got on his high horse and said I’m not going to change Dad’s will when this is what he wanted. He didn’t bother to give me the time of day to look at our records of cancelled checks and we had our own loan for our house.
One of the attorneys told me that there was nothing they could do and that my father’s will should have been looked at years ago.
Okay, sorry this is long, but it still grieves me, but doesn’t hurt as much although it hurts me more the way my siblings are acting. Noone wants to get to the root of problem.
Well, after this happened I would wake up to tears every morning, I would have dreams about my father and the way he was as I was in his home growing up, I would try to figure out why, and wrestled with this heartache every night just about, for a year. Counsel from my Dr. and church leaders would say that my sibling probably have already spent the money, that there isn’t any to give to me.
That’s all well and good, but that doesn’t excuse the lack of understanding nor their desire to check out the details and my side of the story. Only my eldest sister asked me why I brought this up later instead of when I was shown the will.
I explained to her that I was expecting some money as Dad had said to two of my brothers that he had forgave the debt and also my brothers would tell my Dad that he should really tell me before it was too late.
I was with my Dad 24/7, so he had time, but didn’t do it and I feel my brothers should have sat down with him and have this meeting.
I haven’t aggressively pursued anymore “fairness” from my siblings, but it is awkward to be with them. All I can say is that due to my father helping us out with the start of our new business on a shoe string, we have built it to the point that we are recession proof and that in the past year we have been supporting a third brother and his family while he struggles through the ravishes of leukemia he contracted a year ago December.
We moved him from his home state to ours, provided a house without rent, took care of other financial needs and gave emotional support.
While some gambled away their inheritance, some put their money in a stock plan and that tanked and some have lost jobs.
One thing I can say about my brother that has Power of Attorney, is his wife was on her last bout with breast cancer and died shortly after the inheritance was dispersed. So my brother had to deal with a very sick wife and had to fly to visit my Dad, and the same was happening to my older brother.
The stock he had previously also tanked and he had built this luxurious house on 14 acres with 2 built in swimming pools and other ammenities. But this caused trouble in his second marriage and he couldn’t afford the house any longer and had to sell it at a very low price.
So I’ve had many dreams that help me cope with my feelings, frustrations, pain and sorrow, and in making wise decisions, etc.
Wtf? All that for the weakest of all climaxes. Why did I even read your whole story? You could have just said:
“I’ve had a lot of experience with family troubles and disappointments, and interestingly through my mind working out things and dreams I’ve received a lot of peace and comfort”
Terrible.
Can too much sleep be bad? Seems like when I sleep alot I start to wonder if some of what I remember as real could be from dreams.
Holy shit, Cheri. Did you only finally realize where you were posting your grievance at the very end of your message. But it sure is nice to vent, etc.
sleep is good, i think that was fairly obvious. i remember once i got 11 hours of sleep before the school day started and it was amazing, (usually i get 7 hours of sleep.) anyway i never really wondered about the implications so this clears things up a bit. maybe ill sleep more before my next test (i doubt it for some reason.)
I always used to get alot of slack from my roommate for sleeping “too long”. And I also have never had to study anywhere near as much as he or some of my friends. I’m assuming that the correlation of more sleep and memory performance is a fact.
Hmmmm.. I am very curious to know 2 things…….
1) How much does drug addiction (caffeine/nicotine/amphetamine etc) affect one’s sleep. Should smokers take a nicotine patch at night for instance, to ensure a stable sleep.
2) Should AD/HD types continue to take a night dose of stimulants/atomexetine before they go to sleep or at least something to stabilise their sleep patterns?
Or, does this not matter too much because the rest of the body is not so active during sleep?
Anyone who’s interested in sleep should look up sleep disorders and breathing pattern disorders. I recently started working on my breathing, and with improved sleep, I have more energy and a better memory. Anxiety and depression are also less intense.
Some people hyperventilate (mildly) without noticing it, and when they go to bed, they’re not really sleeping that well. They can’t remember dreams, etc, and their body fails to heal and fails to properly encode the day’s events into long-term memory. In my case, it seems like bad breathing patterns set up a multi-year anxiety disorder with depression and a host of idiopathic/somatic physical issues that resembled fibromyalgia. Fortunately, that is all going away along with anxiety and depression. I also had to get my vitamin D levels back to normal.
Sleep and breathing are right next to food and water in terms of having a basis for health and happiness. It’s a crime that psychiatrist prescribe extremely powerful drugs instead of checking these simple physiological things first.
I used to sleep 9-12 hours in my teens and early 20s but now it seems as though I only get 5-7 hours of good sleep. However lately I have had a few nights of 10 hours of sleep and the difference is amazing. I feel less stressed out with little anxiety from starting a new business. I am going to make more efforts to get more sleep. Thanks for the article. Good stuff
I can hardly ever get a good nights sleep! On the weekend i slept for aroun 11 hours as i was feeling a bit odd. I woke up feeling extremely lethargic. Too much sleep i think!
I would go even one step further and say that your subconscious is always working even when you’re mind is engaged in something else.
That would explain all the “eureka” moments where the answer to a problem hits you suddenly when it seems like you’re not even thinking about.
actually i have been seeing dreams for more than 3 years and perhaps whole year not a single miss…..whats the reason??
Our subconcious helps us in facing the future, this i believe. onlt the logic i the subconscious is different from oer external conciousness.I want to see if the experiments will support or oppose such belief.
Sleep is a fundamental aspect of life through it general physical healing evolve beyond human perception. Analysis in the future will emphasis that bone and flesh regeneration speed up in humans at greater pace than light while this event occurs. Vital organs correspond within themselves whilst relaxing. Intellectual evaluation speed up inventive plus creative ideas etc. My thoughts are privately researched. Joseph Emmanuelle Edmeade