New research indicates that sleeping could make you smarter
Researchers in the United States conducting experiments and test into the science of sleep have found that sleeping could hold the key to a good memory and other mental improvements.
Tests conducting on people using word association tests resulted in the finding that after a period of deep sleep, indicated by REM, the test results of the patients improved. REM or rapid eye movement is a phase of sleep that researchers have previously found is indicative of the brain being in a deep sleep mode. It is called Rapid Eye Movement because the human eyes flick back and forth rapidly though the eyelids are shut.
Dr. Sara Medick of Th. University of California said that deep sleep as indicated by REM activity is important to people because it has been discovered that it is during these periods of deep sleep that we actually process information that we have learnt during the day and also when we make memories for later.
The scientists are excited about the fact the findings of these studies may help them to learn more about diseases such as Alzheimer’s and help people suffering from these diseases. Dr Medick said that the research helped them to study and understand the benefits of sleep and would later help doctors help patients develop schedules that would optimise the time and the quality of sleep they got to increase mental capacity and improve their memory.
The tests were conducted on the subjects by using word association tests that made them find words associated with multiple groups of three words, like heart, cookie and sixteen. In this case the word would be sweet. Researchers conducted the tests on the same subjects twice, once in the morning and once in the afternoon with and without deep sleep as indicated by Rapid Eye Movement. The group of subjects who had deep sleep as indicated by REM showed an amazing forty percent improvement over the other groups in the tests.
Other studies at Harvard University have found that memories help people to imagine the future. The research at the university has show that the same part of the brain that is associated with storing memories, the medial temporal lobe is activated when people are imagining the future. This has been shown by brain scans of participants in the study.
Dr. Daniel Stacker for the Harvard University says that the ability to remember events and for memories may be linked to the ability to imagine the future.
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