VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, [2], 3 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 06:46:10 07/07/04 Wed
Author: J.R.Smith,c.f.t.,s.p.n.,s.s.c.
Subject: Sleep on It' Is Good Advice to Improve Memory

Sleep on It' Is Good Advice to Improve Memory

Reuters Health

Thursday, October 9, 2003


LONDON (Reuters) - Nothing beats a good night's sleep, especially to retrieve memory or to boost the ability to learn language, scientists said Wednesday.

The benefits of sleep are well known but researchers at the University of Chicago provide scientific evidence showing that while we sleep the brain activity encourages higher types of learning.

"Sleep has at least two separate effects on learning," said Daniel Margoliash, of the University of Chicago.

"Sleep consolidates memories, protecting them against subsequent interference or decay. Sleep also appears to recover or restore memories," he added in a report in the journal Nature.

He and his colleagues tested the ability of three groups of college students to understand words generated from a difficult-to-comprehend voice synthesizer. They measured their ability to recognize the words and then trained them to do it.

After testing the first group one hour after they had been trained 54 percent recognized the words, more than double the number before training.

The second group was trained in the morning and tested 12 hours later. Only 10 percent did better than before the training. But students trained in the evening and tested the following morning, after a night's sleep, improved their performance by 19 percentage points.

When students who had been trained in the morning were tested again after they slept their scores also improved.

"If performance is reduced by interference, sleep might strengthen relevant associations and weaken irrelevant associations, improving access to relevant memories," the researchers said.

SOURCE: Nature October 9, 2003.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]
[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.