Sleeping Holds the Key to Improving Your Memory

College students are well known for putting in all night study sessions to cram for that big exam, but according to a recent study (and good common sense), students getting more sleep the night before the test is a better way for improving your memory.

Participants in the study, appearing in the November 2008 issue of the journal of Learning & Memory, did a far better job playing a video game they'd learned after a good night's sleep.

It would seem that the brain needs a chance to absorb what it's learned, and may do this as we sleep.

This shows, "that sleep is not just a passive state where no information is coming in," according to study co-author Howard Nusbaum, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago.

It just may be that as you sleep, the brain consolidates things learned during the day.

Neuroscientists at Geneva University found that sleep can have a lasting impact on how the brain processes and stores newly learned data.

They suggest that sleep stimulates new brain connections that make learning stronger, and though the work was unpublished, it was presented at the 6th forum of European Neuroscience in Geneva this summer.

For the most recent U.S. research, the authors recruited 200 mostly female college students, few of whom were familiar with playing video games. Subjects were taught to play games "Quake III" and "Unreal Tournament", both shooting games that called for players to attack enemies.

Subjects who trained in morning sessions showed an average 8% improvement in performance on the game immediately afterward.

Performance was only 4% better when morning trainers played the game after twelve hours.

But the next morning, 24 hours after training and a good night's sleep, subjects scored 10% higher with the games.

The subjects who were trained in evening sessions, performed better with the game the next morning after a night's sleep than they did right after being trained.

Nusbaum explains this by suggesting that people encounter lots of interference during the day, which leads to forgetting some of what's been learned.

This theory is supported by the fact that subjects in the study played the games less well after a day of other activities or just being trained than they did after some good sleep.

"If we train you in the morning and come back at the end of the day, you forget some of what you learned," Nusbaum explains. "But if you sleep after that, it restores some of what you learned."

Other experts, including Jerry Siegel a professor at the Center for Sleep Research at the University of California, Los Angeles, agree that going without sleep can impair your performance.

But that doesn't convince him that sleep all by itself is in any way contributing to the learning process.

He points to work that shows performance being better at the start of a new learning session than it was at the end of the initial session - without sleep being involved.

Perhaps the most important thing to take away from this latest research for improving your memory is that whenever you're learning something new, either professionally or personally, the information is more likely to stick when you're well rested.