Forgetful? Then maybe it’s the way you sleep. This is the conclusion reached by researchers at the Berlin Charité.
Sleep is essential for health. Our brain particularly benefits from nighttime slumber. To a certain extent, it processes the experiences of the day – especially during a phase of nocturnal slumber. Berlin researchers have now found an explanation for this.
Not all sleep is the same. Every night the body goes through different sleep phases, which can last between 90 and 110 minutes. Essentially it’s about the depth of sleep.
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The deep sleep phase in particular seems to have a special meaning for memory, because not only does the body regenerate here, but memory also seems to develop.
“How are memories created?” says a press release from the Charité. “Experts assume that our brain replays the day’s events while we sleep, moving the information from the seat of short-term memory, the hippocampus, to long-term memory in the cerebral cortex.”
The so-called “slow waves” are particularly important for this memory formation: slow, synchronous waves of excitation in the cerebral cortex that occur in the deep sleep phase and can be measured using an electroencephalogram (EEG). If these slow waves of excitation were reinforced from outside, memory performance would improve.
It has long been known that deep sleep supports memory formation. But why was still unexplored. Researchers at the Berlin Charité now have an explanation. To do this, they examined something that is very difficult to obtain: intact tissue from the cerebral cortex. Previous research on the topic has predominantly been carried out on animals.
The Berlin researchers have now discovered that during deep sleep, a region of the brain shows special activity – the neocortex. It is part of the cerebral cortex and consists of up to 23 billion nerve cells. The electrical waves that arise during deep sleep seem to be responsible for transferring memories into the brain’s long-term memory. This is apparently how memory is formed.
How to promote deep sleep: