Whether high school was a piece of cake, or you had to constantly pull all-nighters, Duke’s 100-level courses surely guarantee you days without sleep. Without a doubt, you will have one of those nights where, with sweat running down your back, you will decide that the only way to get yourself out of the mess that procrastination got you in is to stay up all night studying. You may even begin to approximate your grade on the next exam based on the amount of sugar and caffeine stashed within your closet.

Although, you may have dismissed the idea that you need a lot of sleep before an exam as a lay theory with no scientific backing, current research shows otherwise. For the first time, Researchers have identified the role of sleep in learning and memory.

Ever since the discovery of rapid eye movement sleep (REM) in the 1950s, there has not been a major breakthrough that relates sleep to memory. Until recently, all that was known about REM is that it is the portion of sleep characterized by intense brain activity, dreaming, and rapid eye movement. And though controversial that memory is perhaps consolidated during this period. However, a group of scientists led by Carmel M. McDermott of Louisiana State University have made the next breakthrough. The researchers were able to specifically identify how the lack of sleep affects our memory, which part of the brain that it affects, and how it affects it.

            In this experiment performed on rats, the animal with the closest brain chemistry to humans, it was shown that sleep deprivation could seriously impair the ability to recall events.  Specifically, the researchers showed that while sleep deprivation has no impact on cued memory, it significantly impairs contextual memory. Therefore, Although, you can still function while sleep deprived, everything willmay seem normal to you because the world around you is constantly cuing your memory with sounds, words, images, and smells helping you to recall events. However, your academic performance could will be significantly lowered sinceon exam questions, which  do not cue your memory because they are in a different form than questions you have seen before. As McDermott’s study shows, sleep deprivation for three days could impair your ability to recall events that happened 24 hours ago by 88 percent.

Furthermore, the researchers identified the part of the brain that is affected by sleep deprivation to be the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain associated with emotions and the transfer of short-term memory to long-term memory. The researchers found that when a subject is sleep deprived, the brain cells located in this part of the brain are not as excitable as normal brain cells and are less likely to make connections.

Although, the part of the brain that takes the impact of sleep deprivation has been identified, and the impairment of its function can cause  long-term memory lapses and swings in emotion, more research is being done to confirm these side effects.more research needs to be done to confirm this, the impact of sleep deprivation on the hippocampus suggests that sleep deprivation might cause long-term memory lapses and swings in emotion. Therefore, both in the short and long term, your chances of recalling events from memory are significantly improved after a full night of sleep. So the next time it seems like a good idea to stay up all night to review for exams, you are probably better off sleeping.

 

Bibliography

 

McDermott, C.M., LaHoste, G.L., Chen, C. , Musto, A., Bazan, N.G. & Magee, J.C. (2003) Sleep deprivation causes behavioral, synaptic and membrane excitability alterations in hippocampal neurons. The Journal of Neuroscience. 23:9687-9695.