SlumberBlog - Better Pillows

Having a hard time remembering simple facts? Sleep is the remedy.

Besides helping you feel well-rested, getting your zzz’s may also sharpen your memory, a new study shows. Researchers found that sleep not only protects memories from outside interferences, it also helps strengthen them.

There was a very large benefit of sleep for memory consolidation, even larger than we were anticipating,” said study author Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen, an associate neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, and a postdoctoral fellow in sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School.

This study focused on your declarative memory which is your ability to store facts and was made up of 48 participants ages 18-30. Each participant was tasked to memorize word pairs, some were allowed to sleep before their tests and others were not. They also added interference (an extra set of word pairings) to specific groups to see how that would affect the outcome. Here is what they found:

According to the researchers, people who slept after learning the information performed best, successfully recalling more words whether or not there was interference. Those in the sleep group without interference were able to recall 12 percent more word pairings from the first list than the wake group without interference (94 percent recall for the sleep group vs. 82 percent for the wake group).
When presented with interference, those who slept before testing did significantly better at remembering the words (76 percent for the sleep group vs. 32 percent for the wake group).
“We were surprised to find the order of magnitude by which the data demonstrated our effects,” Ellenbogen said.

To ensure a great night’s sleep invest in a quality pillow!

Full Article