GEN-ERIC News

You’ll never again take sleep for granted once you talk to Matthew P. Walker, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School’s sleep and neuroimaging lab. “Sleep plays an important role in processing memories,” he declares. Say you’re taking piano lessons and you learn how to play a scale. The next day, you’ll find that “sleep has enhanced the information that you learned, so you’re 20-40% better in performing those motor skills than you were the day before,” Walker says. “Your brain has continued to learn in the absence of any further practice, which is quite magical.” The window of time for that improvement is limited, however. If you’re a college student and you pull an all-nighter after the piano lesson, you lose out on the memory enhancement permanently, even if you sleep the next night, Walker says. “It’s not practice that makes perfect,” he says, “but it’s practice with a night of sleep that seems to make perfect. If you don’t snooze, you lose.” Sleep apparently rearranges memory within the brain. “We presume that it’s organized into a more efficient storage location,” Walker says. “That means you can recollect that information the next day much better than the day before.” Sleep has this effect only on procedural memories, that is, memories associated with a physical procedure such as playing a piano or riding a bike. These memories are normally used without conscious effort for motor skills that can’t readily be described in words.