According to new research in the June 30 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, during the initial stages of sleep, energy levels increase dramatically in brain regions found to be active during waking hours,These results suggest that a surge of cellular energy may replenish brain processes needed to function normally while awake.

A good night’s rest has clear restorative benefits, but evidence of the actual biological processes that occur during sleep has been elusive.  Studies now show that brain energy levels are key to nightly restoration.

The findings support in biology the basic understanding of the function of sleep. It is somewhat surprising that until now there have been no modern-era studies of brain energy using todays most sensitive measurements.

The studies conclude that sleep is necessary for this energy surge, as keeping awake prevented the surge. The energy increase may then power restorative processes absent during wakefulness, because brain cells consume large amounts of energy just performing daily waking functions.

“This research provides intriguing evidence that a sleep-dependent energy surge is needed to facilitate the restorative biosynthetic processes,” said Robert Greene, MD, PhD, of the University of Texas Southwestern, a sleep expert who was unaffiliated with the study.

This research is aligned with theresults seen from the use of Speed Sleep.  Speed Sleep was specifically designed to deepen sleep and allow access to this research proven restorative process.

When it comes to both remembering and executing items on tomorrow’s to-do list, it’s best to think it over, then “sleep on it,” say research psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis.

People who sleep after processing and storing a memory carry out their intentions much better than people who try to execute their plan before getting to sleep. The key finding is that researchers have shown how sleep enhances our ability to remember to do something in the future, a skill known as prospective memory.

Researchers that are studying the relationship between memory and sleep say that our ability to carry out our intentions is not so much a function of how firmly that intention has been embedded in our memories. Rather, the trigger that helps carry out our intentions is usually a place, situation or circumstance - some context encountered the next day - that sparks the recall of an intended action.

Prospective memory includes such things as remembering to take a medication, buying a Mother’s Day card or bringing home the ice cream for a birthday party. While the vast majority of sleep literature in psychology is devoted to retrospective memory, this study is the first foray into the relationship between sleep and prospective memory, the kind of memory we put to work every day. The findings, researchers say, offer important contributions to the understanding of the role sleep plays in cognition as well as memory.

Let’s say that you intend to give a friend a message tomorrow, McDaniel explains. Seeing the friend the next day will be a strong cue for remembering to give the message. But, during the time your brain encoded the intention, you’re also vaguely thinking of a place the two of you will meet the next afternoon. The context of the place is weakly associated with your intention to give the message even though you haven’t really thought explicitly about associating the place with the message.

“We found that sleep benefits prospective memory by strengthening the weak associations in the brain, and that hasn’t been shown before,” Scullin says.

“One of the more provocative findings we have is that sleep didn’t strengthen the link between the explicit cue, which is the person, and the intention, rather it strengthened the weak association and the intention,” McDaniel says.

The researchers believe that the prospective memory process occurs during slow wave sleep - an early pattern in the sleep cycle - involving communication between the hippocampus and cortical regions. The hippocampus is very important in memory formation and reactivation and the cortical regions are keys to storing memories.

“We think that during slow wave sleep the hippocampus is reactivating these recently learned memories, taking them up and placing them in long-term storage regions in the brain,” Scullin says. “The physiology of slow wave sleep seems very conducive to this kind of memory strengthening.”

Source:
Gerry Everding
Washington University in St. Louis