From lowering your risk of obesity and heart disease to improving your concentration and overall daily performance, sleep has been proven to play a critical role in our health.
In a new study, researchers found that sleep may also help people to learn continuously throughout their lifetime.
The research was conducted by a team at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine.
The team used computational models capable of simulating different brain states, such as sleep and awake, to examine how sleep consolidates newly encoded memories and prevents damage to old memories.
Their findings suggest that memories are dynamic, not static. In other words, memories, even old memories, are not final. Sleep constantly updates them.
They predict that during the sleep cycle, both old and new memories are spontaneously replayed, which prevents forgetting and increases recall performance.
The team says that memory replay during sleep plays a protective role against forgetting by allowing the same populations of neurons to store multiple interfering memories.
For example, imagine learning how to navigate to a parking lot by going left at one-stop sign and right at one traffic light.
The next day, you have to learn how to get to a different parking lot using different directions. The team says sleep consolidates those memories to allow recollection of both.
The restorative value of sleep may be what is lacking in current state-of-the-art computer systems that power self-driving cars and recognize images with performances that far exceed humans.
However, these artificial intelligence systems lack the ability to learn continuously and will forget old knowledge when new information is learned.
The study results could lead to developing new stimulation techniques during sleep to improve memory and learning. This may be particularly important in older adults or persons suffering from learning disabilities.
One author of the study is Maksim Bazhenov, Ph.D., a professor of medicine at UC San Diego.
The study is published in eLife.
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