Sleep and Memory: the Correlation

Did you ever give a thought to the phrase, ‘Let me sleep on it’? Have you noticed how things seem so much clearer and decisions so much easier to make when you have had a good, refreshing night’s sleep?

I recall how during examination days, I would study for a few hours and then take an hour’s nap. That seemed to give my brain the time to consolidate and retain that which I had learnt and studied. If I had a sleep break, I was better able to retain what I had studied, and the material was clearer inside my head somehow.

This is just my personal practical experience of how sleep and memory are linked, there is also a wealth of scientific data now to prove that an optimum amount of sleep is required not just for memory retention but also for good health and well being.

It has been shown that...

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How Memory is Created!

What is so scary about memory is how it is inexplicably lost. For the longest time memory and the functioning of the brain used to be an incomprehensible puzzle for mankind but now as psychological research progresses, we are understanding more and more how the brain works; how memory is created, how it is stored and how it may be retrieved.

I read an interesting explanation about how memory is created here: creating our brain memories is a bit like creating say a word document which will be lost after creating, unless you hit ‘Save’ and it is similar in the case of our brains as well. Our brain also enables us to first create the memories and then to stabilize and 'save' the memories we've created, which can also then be edited.

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