Sleep Boosts Memory Accessibility

The beneficial impact of sleep on memory is well established, and the act of sleeping is known to help us remember the things that we did, or heard, the previous day. Nicholas Dumay, from the University of Exeter (United Kingdom), explored whether memories could be sharpened and made more vivid and accessible overnight. The study tracked memories for novel, made-up words learned either prior to a night's sleep, or an equivalent period of wakefulness. Subjects were asked to recall words immediately after exposure, and then again after the period of sleep or wakefulness.  Sleep helped rescue unrecalled memories more than it prevented memory loss.  The study author reports that: “sleep indeed protects against retroactive, unspecific interference, it also clearly promotes access to those memories initially too weak to be retrieved.”