Brief disturbances of sleep may interfere with the normal process of solidifying the memories we form during the day.
In a new study, healthy people performed better on a task they had learned the day before after getting a good night's sleep. By contrast, participants with mild sleep apnea, which causes sleep disturbances, showed virtually no improvement on the task the next day.
The finding adds to a growing body of research showing sleep aids in memory consolidation and canimprove the ability to perform certain memory tasks, particularly those that require motor memory, such as riding a bike. But the study also shows "it's not just the amount of sleep, it's really having restful sleep that’s not interrupted that is important," said study researcher Dr. Ina Djonlagic, a physician in the division of sleep medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
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Sleep and memory
Scientists divide the memory process into three main stages: encoding, consolidating and retrieving. The consolidation of memories includes stabilizing and storing them for the long term.
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After a night's rest, and with no additional training, the healthy participants showed a 14 percent improvement in their task accuracy and speed. However, the sleep apnea patients showed almost no improvement, and some did worse than the day before, Djonlagic said.
Alertness was not an issue: Both groups performed equally well on a reaction task in the morning testing their alertness, Djonlagic said.
No relationship was found between participants' performance on the morning task and the amount of oxygen deprivation they experienced at night. However, there was a link between task performance and the number of times participants were roused from sleep: The worst performances appeared related to the greatest number of disturbances.
Memory problems
"This highlights the fact that the arousals that are associated with sleep apnea truly can have an impact on someone's memory," sleep expert Dr. David Neubauer, who was not involved in the study, said of the findings. The impact may be especially pronounced in people with more severe sleep apnea, said Neubauer, who is at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
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The study is published today (March 28) in the journal PLoS ONE.
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