LONDON: Sleeping not only protects memories from being forgotten, it also makes them easier to access, according to new research from the University of Exeter and the Basque Centre for Cognition, Brain and Language. The findings suggest that after sleep we are more likely to recall facts which we could not remember while still awake.
In two situations where subjects forgot information over the course of 12 hours of wakefulness, a night’s sleep was shown to promote access to memory traces that had initially been too weak to be retrieved.
The research, published today in the journal Cortex, tracked memories for novel, made-up words learnt either prior to a night’s sleep, or an equivalent period of wakefulness. Subjects were asked to recall words immediately after exposure, and then again after the period of sleep or wakefulness.
The key distinction was between those word memories which participants could remember at both the immediate test and the 12-hour retest, and those not remembered at test, but eventually remembered at retest.
The researcher found that, compared to daytime wakefulness, sleep helped rescue unrecalled memories more than it prevented memory loss.
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