Want to succeed at finals? Get a really good night's sleep the night before.
After a good night’s sleep, people remember information better when they know it will be useful in the future. The findings suggest that the brain evaluates memories during sleep and preferentially retains the information that is most likely to be needed again in the future.
Humans deal with huge amounts of information every day. Most is stored in memories, but the majority is quickly forgotten. How does the brain decide what to keep and what to forget? Apparently it has to do with a selection formula:
“Our results show that memory consolidation during sleep indeed involves a basic selection process that determines which of the many pieces of the day’s information is sent to long-term storage. Our findings also indicate that information relevant for future demands is selected foremost for storage.” (Jan Born, PhD, of the University of Lübeck in Germany)
The research team devised several very clever experiments to determine exactly how this selection works. Using fMRI and other electronic testing methods, they were also able to determine when such filtering occurred.
“The more slow [brain] wave activity the sleeping participants had, the better their memory was during the recall test 10 hours later,” Born said. The study authors suggest that the brain “tags” memories while awake and then consolidates them during sleep.
This would be akin to the day shift working on a report and telling the night shift to, “Put all the pages marked with red tags into the red filing cabinet, the green tagged pages in the green cabinet, and toss the untagged pages while you’re at it…”
My recommendation base on this study’s results:
