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In 1924, Jenkins and Dallenbach expanded on Ebbinghaus ( 1885) studies of forgetting curves and reported that sleep after encoding of nonsense syllables supports memory consolidation, inasmuch as it reduces forgetting compared to an interval containing only wakefulness (Jenkins and Dallenbach, 1924). Memory is established in three stages new memories are initially acquired (encoding), become strengthened and reorganized (consolidation), and are finally recalled (retrieval Figure Figure1 1 upper panel).
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Smartsleep research articles Offline#
However, recent research indicates that sleep's function goes beyond rest and replenishment (in itself a good reason to sleep) and constitutes a state of active offline information processing essential to the appropriate functioning of learning and memory. Our modern society has formed an ill-advised but strong belief that sleep is an annoying habit that should be kept at a strict minimum to enhance productivity. This review briefly introduces the basic concepts and central findings of the research on sleep and memory, and discusses implications of this lab-based work for everyday applications to make the best possible use of sleep's beneficial effect on learning and memory. During wakefulness overshooting potentiation causes an imbalance in synaptic weights that is countered by synaptic downscaling during subsequent sleep. Apart from consolidating previously learned information, sleep also facilitates the encoding of new memories after sleep, which probably relies on the renormalization of synaptic weights during sleep as suggested by the synaptic homeostasis theory. According to the active system consolidation account, trace reactivation leads to the redistribution of the transient memory representations from the hippocampus to the long-lasting knowledge networks of the cortex. The finding that newly encoded memories become reactivated during subsequent sleep fostered the idea that reactivation leads to the strengthening and transformation of the memory trace. For the declarative memory domain, slow wave sleep (the deepest sleep stage) has the greatest beneficial effect on the consolidation of memories acquired during preceding wakefulness. The last decade has witnessed a spurt of new publications documenting sleep's essential contribution to the brains ability to form lasting memories.