Eesha Week 13: The Undervalued Unconscious
Sleep is often described as our body's "reset button," but as we all know the significance of sleep goes beyond its identification as mere rest. Recent research goes to show the critical role sleep plays on one's memory consolidation.
Each night, as we lie down and close our eyes, our bodies enter the unconscious. Where we not only dwell in the process of rejuvenation and relaxation, but also where our minds perform various cognitive activities such as offline or overnight learning. Studies show that newly acquired skills are faced with superior retention following sleep in comparison to wakefulness.
In our non-REM stage 3 of sleep, through a routine known as slow-wave-sleep, our brain's neural patterns facilitate information from our short-term memory to our long-term memory. For example, you’re more likely to recall something you've done right before going to sleep in comparison to something you've done earlier in the day.
Simultaneously, sleep also promotes synaptic plasticity. A procedure in which synaptic connections that are activated during our waking experiences are selectively reinforced, while irrelevant and extraneous connections are pruned away. Through refinement and strengthening processes such as these, our mind's neural circuits with underlying memory representations make our brain's memory more resistant to decay over time.
The intricate relationship between sleep and memory consolidation ultimately displays and unveils the profound vitality of our rest. In acknowledging the significance of how sleep shapes our memories, we can all grow to value sleep and its contribution to our overall well-being.
Hi Eesha! Thank you for this informative post about the important role sleep plays in memory consolidation. Although I was already aware to some extent that sleep was important to retaining information, it was nonetheless interesting to learn about the technical details behind that process.
ReplyDeleteMy personal experiences can certainly confirm as much. On days when I do not get much sleep, on top of being generally miserable and tired, I also find it especially difficult to retain new information or remember information I had learned in the past. On the contrary, on days when I got more sleep, I was able to remember information much more easily.
Memory is yet another reason that we should all strive to get healthy amounts of sleep, but it can be difficult—especially in 11th grade—to achieve that, as many of us have heavy burdens of schoolwork, extracurriculars, and everything in between. I can say with certainty that AP Lang alone has cost me a significant amount of sleep.