What Does Sleep Have to Do with Relational Memory?
“Everything,” Says a Recent Study from BIDMC and BWH
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Brigham Women’s Hospital (BWH) researchers led a study about sleep and relational memory. The study determined there is a need to take a break from learning in order to have all the pieces of information fit together. The most efficient and necessary break is sleep.
Led by researchers at BIDMC and BWH, the findings appear online in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on April 20, 2007. See www.pnas.org and http://bidmc.harvard.edu.
We learn information by reading, watching, doing, and listening, but we perform a higher level of thinking by using that information to come up with unique applications and ideas. That higher level of thinking requires sleep.
Sleep deprivation affects our abilities to relate separate pieces of information to each other, much like a jigsaw puzzle. Without sleep, the pieces of knowledge remain separated. With sleep, the pieces of the puzzle fit together to form a picture, are placed into proper sequence, and we see the finished puzzle, the big picture.
Fifty-six healthy college students took part in the study. The entire group studied a comparative situation for 30 minutes, and then were tested. Half the group got sleep and half the group did not. The group that did not sleep lacked the ability to compare and evaluate the relationship of the pieces of information. The group that slept were able to put the information together to complete the picture.
Matthew Walker, PhD, Director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory at BIDMC and Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School (HMS), concluded that “These findings point to an important benefit [of sleep] that we had not previously considered. Sleep not only strengthens a person’s individual memories, it appears to actually knit them together and helps realize how they are associated with one another. And this may, in fact, turn out to be the primary goal of sleep: You go to bed with pieces of the memory puzzle, and awaken with the jigsaw completed.”
In my teaching experiences I have noticed that the more “hooks” people have in their memory banks on which to hang new knowledge, the easier they learn and remember. Now I know how important sleep really is to joining pieces together for relational and logical thought processes. With sleep deprivation being so prevalent, however, getting sufficient sleep may be difficult, but that is an entirely different article. Look for helpful hints, take a quiz, and learn about sleep on the National Sleep Foundation website at www.sleepfoundation.org. Assign research papers and have students present the different aspects of sleep, the effects of deprivation on learning, and some solutions to sleep struggles.
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