One More Reason To Prioritize Sleep To Fight Cognitive Decline

We’ve talked sometimes at 10almonds about how important sleep is for many aspects of health, including for brain health, and including in later life.

There’s a common myth that older people require less sleep; the reality is that sleeping less and not dying of it does not equate to needing less.

See also: Sleep: Yes, You Really Do Still Need It!

And: How Sleep-Deprived Are You, Really?

Quantity is not everything though; quality absolutely matters too. We’ve written about that here:

The 6 Dimensions Of Sleep (And Why They Matter) ← duration is just one dimension out of the six

We’ve even gone into some more obscure, but still very important things, such as: How Your Sleep Position Changes Dementia Risk

We’ve also talked about the role of sleep in memory (and forgetting): How Your Brain Chooses What To Remember

With that in mind…

Some more recent science

This study was about spatial memory, but what’s important (in our opinion) is that it’s about solidifying recent learning.

Researchers measured brain activity in rats for up to 20 hours of sleep following spatial learning tasks. Initially, the neuronal patterns observed during sleep mirrored those from the learning phase. However, as sleep progressed, these patterns transformed to resemble the activity seen when the rats later recalled the locations of food rewards. Interestingly, this reorganization happened during non-REM sleep, which means it wasn’t just a case of “the rats were dreaming about their day” (which is a well-established way in which memories do get encoded), but rather, the newly-learned experiences were being actively encoded in the rest of sleep.

This is critical, because in age-related cognitive decline, it’s very common for very long-term memory (VLTM) to remain intact, while LTM and short-term memory (STM) crumble. For example, someone may remember many details of their life from 20 years ago, but forget where they currently live, or what happened in the conversation two minutes ago.

In other words, the biggest problem is not the storage of memories, but rather the encoding of them in the first place.

Which sleep facilitates!

And it’s also important to note that part about it being the rest of sleep, because when the brain is sleep-deprived, it’ll tend to prioritize REM sleep, which is important, but that means cutting back on other phases of sleep, and from this study, we can see that memory & learning will be amongst the things adversely affected by such cuts.

Here’s the paper, for those interested:

Sleep stages antagonistically modulate reactivation drift

And for those who prefer lighter reading, here’s a pop-science article about the same study, which explains it in more words than we can here:

Sleep keeps memories fresh: Study finds neural patterns reorganize during sleep to boost recollection

But wait, there’s more!

Sleep resets neurons for new memories the next day, study finds

So, once again… It is absolutely critical to prioritize good sleep.

Want to know more?

Check out:

Calculate (And Enjoy) The Perfect Night’s Sleep

Take care!