To remember new information - such as phone numbers, or new vocabulary words is one thing, quite another is the creation of a backup in the brain, which is available to you whenever you need it.
Analysis conducted by researchers from Harvard Medical School shows that sleep helps for learning new information, and creating an archive in the brain.
Researchers found that sleep helps a lot in remembering of new words and filling the vocabulary. During a long experiment, the researchers drove volunteers to learn new words at night, as soon as they undergo tests.
Volunteers slept for nights in the laboratory, during their sleep brain activity is recorded using the electroencephalogram.
In the morning it is clear that participants in the experiment were able to think of new words much more quickly after waking than once they had heard them first.
This phenomenon did not occur in a control group of volunteers who were trained early in the morning and went through tests at night, and during this time were not able to sleep.
Study of the brain waves of volunteers during sleep, showed that deep sleep is much more than rapid eye movement, and even light sleep helps in absorbing new information.
Scientists have discovered different types of brain activity in sleep. Periods of sleep have short but intense bursts of brain activity, that reflects the information transmission between different areas of memory in the brain - the hippocampus in the depths of the brain and the neo core on the surface of the brain.
Hippocampus in memory is loaded separately from other types of memory and memory neo core is related to all other knowledge.
Volunteers who slept more hours, were able to cope with new vocabulary tests, which showed that new words are transmitted by the hippocampus in the neo core during sleep.
Professor Gareth Geskal, who led the study, said: "The test results show the importance of sleep and the basic process of expanding vocabulary in the brain. The brain probably reacts the same way with other types of training. "
