March 07, 2023
Becca Ray
Sleeping your way to an "A" using smell
It is commonly known that sleep is an important biological process. It’s required for basic brain processing, maintaining good health, and preventing a range of disorders and diseases (US Dept of Health 2022). Sleep is also very important for facilitating memory consolidation. When we first create new memories, they are in a fragile state and susceptible to interference and deterioration. During memory consolidation, the fragile memory is strengthened via short- and long-term processes in which the memory is integrated with previous knowledge pathways in the brain, therefore making memory reactivation – the ability to remember or recall information – possible in the future. Since very little new information is taken in while we are sleeping, the time we spend asleep is when most of our memory consolidation occurs (Rasch and Born, 2013).
Even though our brains work very hard while we are sleeping to consolidate our memories, we often cannot consolidate all the information we received during the day, thus some is left to decay. The memories that are most likely to be consolidated are ones that hold personal or emotional importance, are connected to a reward, or ones that hold information we know we will need in the future (Jönsson and Pace-Schott, 2021).