How Can Enhanced Sleep Help with Better Memory?
Maintaining a healthy lifestyle, which includes obtaining regular and quality sleep, may be difficult, especially if you are anxious about a job deadline or an exam. However, remember that sleep is your friend (and you will need it to do this!).
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Medical Care Review | Tuesday, April 15, 2025
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Fremont, CA: It's no secret that getting a good night's sleep helps you feel better. Sleep allows your body to relax and replenish and may also improve your brain's learning and memory abilities.
While your body sleeps, your brain absorbs day-to-day information and creates memories. Sleep deprivation increases your chance of acquiring a variety of significant health conditions, including hypertension, obesity, and diabetes, and impairs your capacity to develop and remember new knowledge.
This may not surprise anybody who has worked an all-nighter prepping for an exam only to discover that the facts and statistics they understood at 2 a.m. could not be remembered the next day. Without enough sleep, your brain gets hazy, your judgment is impaired, and your fine motor skills suffer.
According to imaging and behavioral research, sleep is still essential in learning and memory.
Scientists aren't sure how sleep improves memory, but it appears to involve the hippocampus and neocortex—the parts of the brain that retain long-term memories. It is considered that during sleep, the hippocampus replays the day's events for the neocortex, where it analyzes and integrates memories, allowing them to endure for a long time.
Researchers are still investigating the stages of sleep that are important in forming certain types of memories. According to several research, specific memories become persistent during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which occurs when you dream. Other research has discovered that particular memories are most frequently stored during slow-wave, deep sleep. Scientists are coming closer to knowing what sleep does to the brain, but many mysteries remain to be solved.
Sleep is unquestionably a biological necessity—we require it to survive. Unfortunately, few of us nowadays can obtain the sleep we need to perform well. Experts recommend that individuals obtain seven to nine hours of sleep every night. While this may not be possible every night, it should be the objective.
