The benefits of sleep are well-documented, but researcher Sara C. Mednick, PhD, and her colleagues are finding that certain stages of sleep actually have distinct roles in people’s memory capacity. The REM (rapid eye movement) sleep stage — where people’s dreams are most vivid — is also important for people’s memory systems, Mednick found.
Mednick, who is a leading sleep researcher at the University of California, San Diego, presented findings from a recent study. Using a creativity task called a Remote Associates Test, study participants were shown multiple groups of three words (e.g., cookie, heart, sixteen) and asked to find another word that can be associated with all three words. In this case, the answer would have been “sweet.” Participants were tested once in the morning and again in the afternoon, either after a nap with REM sleep, one without REM sleep or a quiet rest period.
Although the quiet rest and non-REM sleep groups received the same words prior to the association task, they displayed no improvement on the Remote Associates Test. However, the REM sleep group improved by almost 40 percent over their morning performances. The authors hypothesize that the formation of associative networks from previously unassociated information in the brain, leading to creative problem-solving, is facilitated by changes to neurotransmitter systems during REM sleep.
REM has been shown multiple times to help with memory- even for motor tasks. Naps can aid with this memory consolidation… as long as you get to the REM stage before you wake up. You will preform better on a test (for example) if after you study, you sleep and consolidate everything you learned before you take the exam.
