New Study: Sleep Helps Us Learn and Memorise

Sleep makes you feel better, but its importance goes way beyond just boosting your mood or banishing under-eye circles. Adequate sleep is a key part of a healthy lifestyle, and can benefit your heart, weight, mind, and more. Scientists have found the underlying mechanism of how sleep helps us learn and memorise.

Benefits of sufficient Sleep:

(Sleep is a naturally recurring state of mind characterized by altered consciousness, relatively inhibited sensory activity, inhibition of nearly all voluntary muscles, and reduced interactions with surroundings.)

A new study suggests that sleeping triggers the synapses in our brain to both strengthen and weaken, which prompts the forgetting, strengthening or modification of our memories in a process known as long-term potentiation(LTP).

Researchers led by Sidarta Ribeiro at the Brain Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, measured the levels of a protein related to LTP during the sleep cycle of rats.

The results shown that sleep can have completely different effects depending on whether LTP is present or not.

A lack of LTP leads to memory removal, while its presence can either strengthen memories or prompt the emergence of new ones.

The research provides an empirical and theoretical framework to understand the mechanisms underlying the complex role of sleep for learning, which involves selective remembering as well as creativity.

Courtesy: Google News, WikiSource 

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