The second benefit of sleep for memory comes after learning, one that effectively clicks the “save” button on those newly created files. In doing so, sleep protects newly acquired information, affording immunity against forgetting: an operation called consolidation.
That sleep sets in motion the process of memory consolidation was recognized long ago, and may be one of the oldest proposed functions of sleep. The first such claim in the written human record appears to be by the prophetic Roman rhetorician Quintilian (AD 35–100), who stated:
It is a curious fact, of which the reason is not obvious, that the interval of a single night will greatly increase the strength of the memory …. Whatever the cause, things which could not be recalled on the spot are easily coordinated the next day, and time itself, which is generally accounted one of the causes of forgetfulness, actually serves to strengthen the memory.
It was not until 1924 when two German researchers, John Jenkins and Karl Dallenbach, pitted sleep and wake against each other to see which one won out for a memory-savings benefit, a memory researchers’ version of the classic Coke vs. Pepsi challenge.
Their study participants first learned a list of verbal facts. Thereafter, the researchers tracked how quickly the participants forgot those memories over an eight-hour time interval, either spent awake or across a night of sleep.
Time spent asleep helped cement the newly learned chunks of information, preventing them from fading away. In contrast, an equivalent time spent awake was deeply hazardous to recently acquired memories, resulting in an accelerated trajectory of forgetting.
The experimental results of Jenkins and Dallenbach have now been replicated time and again, with a memory retention benefit of between 20 and 40 percent being offered by sleep, compared to the same amount of time awake.
This is not a trivial concept when you consider the potential advantages in the context of studying for an exam, for instance, or evolutionarily, in remembering survival-relevant information such as the sources of food and water and locations of mates and predators.
It was not until the 1950s, with the discovery of NREM and REM sleep, that we began to understand more about how, rather than simply if, sleep helps to solidify new memories.
Initial efforts focused on deciphering what stage(s) of sleep made immemorial that which we had imprinted onto the brain during the day, be it facts in the classroom, medical knowledge in a residency training program, or a business plan from a seminar.
We obtain most of our deep NREM sleep early in the night, and much of our REM sleep (and lighter NREM sleep) late in the night.
After having learned lists of facts, researchers allowed participants the opportunity to sleep only for the first half of the night or only for the second half of the night. In this way, both experimental groups obtained the same total amount of sleep (albeit short), yet the former group’s sleep was rich in deep NREM, and the latter was dominated instead by REM.
The stage was set for a battle royal between the two types of sleep. The question: Which sleep period would confer a greater memory savings benefit—that filled with deep NREM, or that packed with abundant REM sleep?
For fact-based, textbook-like memory, the result was clear. It was early-night sleep, rich in deep NREM, that won out in terms of providing superior memory retention savings relative to late-night, REM-rich sleep.
Study infants, young kids, or adolescents and you see the very same overnight memory benefit of NREM sleep, sometimes even more powerfully so.
For those in midlife, forty- to sixty-year-olds, deep NREM sleep continues to help the brain retain new information in this way, with the decline in deep NREM sleep and the deterioration in the ability to learn and retain memories in old age having already been discussed.
At every stage of human life, the relationship between NREM sleep and memory solidification is therefore observed. It’s not just humans, either. Studies in chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans have demonstrated that all three groups are better able to remember where food items have been placed in their environments by experimenters after they sleep.
Descend down the phylogenetic chain to cats, rats, and even insects, and the memory-maintaining benefit of NREM sleep remains on powerful display.
Not only does sleep maintain those memories you have successfully learned before bed, but it will even salvage those that appeared to have been lost soon after learning.
In other words, following a night of sleep you regain access to memories that you could not retrieve before sleep. Like a computer hard drive where some files have become corrupted and inaccessible, sleep offers a recovery service at night.
Having repaired those memory items, rescuing them from the clutches of forgetting, you awake the next morning able to locate and retrieve those once unavailable memory files with ease and precision. The “ah yes, now I remember” sensation that you may have experienced after a good night of sleep.
Coach HB