With the passage of time, many memories of the distant past tend to gradually fade from our memory. Others, on the other hand, are preserved with astonishing clarity. New research has explored this question, taking into account the role that sleep plays in the processes that organize the preservation of memories.
Maksim Bazhenov’s team from the University of California, San Diego, United States, has used computer models capable of simulating different states of the brain, such as sleep and wakefulness, to examine how sleep consolidates newly encoded memories and prevents old memories deteriorate.
The brain is very busy when we sleep, processing what we have experienced and learned during the day. Sleep helps to rearrange memories and stores them in the most efficient way each time. In Bazhenov’s words, the results of the new study suggest that memories are dynamic, not static. In other words, memories, even old ones, are not final. The dream carries out maintenance tasks on them. Everything points to the fact that, during the sleep cycle, both old and new memories are spontaneously recalled, which prevents forgetting and increases the efficiency of their storage and accessibility.
Bazhenov explains that recalling memories during sleep plays a protective role against forgetting by allowing the same populations of neurons to store multiple memories that could interfere with each other. “We learn a lot of new things every day and those memories compete with the old memories. To accommodate all the memories, we need to sleep.”
The results of the study could lead to the development of new stimulation techniques during sleep to improve memory and learning, according to Bazhenov. This can be particularly important in the elderly or people with learning difficulties.
Oscar González, Yury Sokolov, Giri Krishnan and Jean Erik Delanois, all from the University of California at San Diego, have also worked on the research.
Source: Ncyt de Amazings
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