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Surprisingly, taking a shuteye right after memorizing might be the best way to remember difficult lessons, as a new study by German researchers suggests that sleeping boosts memory retention and helps in learning faster.

Previous researches have established that fresh memories are stored temporarily in the hippocampal region of the brain, and reactivating these memories soon after learning helps in transferring the information permanently to brain's 'hard drive,' the neocortex.

The present study findings provide a completely different insight to the cognitive process by which we store and retrieve the acquired information, that is, learning.

According to the report, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the brain works better during sleep than in wakefulness to safeguard a recent memory and hence prevents it from getting fragile.

Study details

For the study purpose, Bjorn Rasch of the University of Lubeck in Germany along with his three colleagues designed an experiment to find whether memories are better retained during sleeping.

During the study, 24 participants were asked to memorize 15 pairs of cards showing pictures of animals and everyday objects. While doing the task, participants were exposed to slightly unpleasant smell.

Forty minutes later, half of the participants were asked to stay awake and learn another set of cards while other half were asked to take a short nap in between the two exercises.

The first group was exposed to the foul smell just before the assessment, while second group was made to smell during snoozing, just to trigger the memory of the first task.

Study findings

To the researchers' surprise, participants who slept in between the exercises performed better on retaining the learned experiences as compared to those who remained awake.

The sleep group retained 85 percent of the patterns while the awake group remembered 60 percent of the patterns.

Researchers averred that the study findings may help in healing patients suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD), a debilitating condition caused by extreme experiences.

Lead author Susanne Diekelmann, also from the University of Lubeck said, "Reactivation of memories had completely different effects on the state of wakefulness and sleep," said

"Based on brain imaging data, we suggest the reason for this unexpected result is that already during the first few minutes of sleep, the transfer from hippocampus to neocortex has been initiated," she wrote in an email exchange.

"After only 40 minutes of shuteye, significant chunks of memory were already "downloaded" and stored where they "could no longer be disrupted by new information that is encoded in the hippocampus," she explained.

"Human memory is absolutely dynamic. Memories are not statically 'archived' in the neocortex but are subject to constant changes by various influences," she said.

Likewise, the act of remembering does not simply entail "reading" the stored data, she added. "Recall is a reconstructive process in which memories can be changed and distorted."