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Do sleep and dreams help us form memories?


Dr. Mark Blagrove


It has been known for decades that if you learn something and recall it 8 hours later, the recall is better if the 8 hours were spent asleep than if spent awake. The question, though, is whether sleep is somehow necessary or helpful for our memories to be formed. The rapid eye movement stage of sleep has been proposed as important for memory, and in some studies REM sleep increases after learning, and especially after learning of emotional information. Also, if animals are deprived of REM sleep, but allowed all other parts of sleep, their learning can be harmed, and some brain cells that fire during learning get excited again during sleep. However, opponents of this idea - that sleep aids memory - reply that our ability to learn is not affected when REM sleep is greatly diminished by the taking of anti-depressants. In a recent study on learning the video-game Tetrus it was found that learners incorporated images from the game into the dreams that occurred when they fell asleep, and it has been proposed that the loose thinking that occurs in dreams may have a function of forming and connecting memories together. Arguments and experiments for and against the idea that sleep and dreams have a role to play in forming memories will be explained in this talk.

Dr. Mark Blagrove is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Wales, Swansea. He researches the cognitive effects of sleep loss, and the associations between waking events, cognition, and personality with dreams and nightmares. He is a consulting editor for the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, the journal Dreaming, and is on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Sleep Research. He is a co-editor of the forthcoming book Sleep and Dreaming: Scientific Advances and Reconsiderations (Cambridge University Press).