Important role of sleep in storing memories

   Now, a small group of neuroscientists is arguing that at least one vital function of sleep is bound up with learning and memory. A cascade of new findings, in animals and humans, suggests that sleep plays a critical role in flagging and storing important memories, both intellectual and physical, and perhaps in seeing subtle connections that were invisible during waking.

 

   The theory is controversial, and some scientists insist that it’s still for from clear whether the sleeping brain can do any thing with memories that the waking brain doesn’t also do, in moments of quiet contemplation. Scientists have come to understand the sleeping brain. Once seen as a purposeful machine, a secretive intelligence that comes out during periods of dreaming and during the nether world chasms known as deep sleep, “ to do science you have to have an idea, and for years had one; they saw sleep as nothing but an annihilations of consciousness “, said J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatry professor at Harvard. “ Now we know different “

   The evidence was there all along. Infants make sucking motions when asleep, and their closed eyelids quiver. But it wasn’t until the early 1950 s, in lab at the university of Chicago, that scientists recorded and identified what was happening. Eugene Aserinsky, then a graduate student in psychology, reportedly was monitoring sleep and waking in his 8-year-old son, using electronic leads stuck to the boy’s head, connected to a brain – wave detecting machine he had attached two leads to the boy’s eyelids as well, so he could tell whther his son woke up. One night he noticed percolating wave patterns that showed the boy had awoken. But he hadn’t.