One of the fascinating things about sleep is we tend to think, oh, nothing’s happening. I’m not getting anything done. But your brain is hugely at work. There are all these different stages of sleep where you can see these symphony of waves, where different parts of the brain are talking to each other, essentially. And so, we know for a fact that some of these stages of sleep, what happens is the brain will flush out toxins, like the amyloid protein that can build up over the course of a day. So just by virtue of that function, sleep is very important. But then on top of it, what we can see is that the neurons that were active during a particular experience, have come back alive during sleep. And so there seems to be some processing of memories that happen during sleep, and that the processing of memories can sometimes lead to some parts of the memory being strengthened, or sometimes you’re better able to integrate what happened recently with things that happened in the past. And so, sleep scientist Matt Walker likes to say that sleep converts memory into wisdom, for instance.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Ranganath directs the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California, Davis, where he’s a professor of psychology and neuroscience.
And, one of the nice things about writing this editorial is I got a lot of feedback from people who felt personally relieved by this because they’re worried about their own memories."
But then I think the most insidious of all are the alerts and the distractions that we put upon ourselves with smartphones and smartwatches where there’s things constantly buzzing and grabbing our attention, and then people start to get bad habits like checking texts and emails.
And what can happen is, this can be causing damage to areas like the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex so that they’re no longer functioning as efficiently as you would hope they would.
And so, we know for a fact that some of these stages of sleep, what happens is the brain will flush out toxins, like the amyloid protein that can build up over the course of a day.
And I do believe it’s controversial, but I do believe in the idea that sometimes you can wake up and through that memory processing, actually have the ability to solve a problem that you couldn’t do when you were, before you went to sleep.
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