The brain cherry-picks seçme yapmak (ey iyileri seçmek) what people remember during sleep,resulting in sebep olmak sharper and clearer thinking, a new study suggests.
Previous önceki research had shown that sleep helps people consolidate pekiştirmek their memories,fixing gözlerini dikmek them in the brain so we can retrieve geri almak them later.
But the new study, a review eleştiri based on new studies as well as past research on sleep and memory, suggests that sleep also transforms memories in ways that make them somewhat less accurate kesin but more useful in the long run uzun vadede.
For example, sleep-enabled memories may help people produce üretmek insight sezme, draw , and inferences sonuç foster beslemek abstract soyut thought during waking hours.
"The sleeping brain isn't stupid—it doesn't just consolidate everything you put into it, but calculates what to remember and what to forget," said study leader Jessica Payne, a cognitive bilişsel neuroscientist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
Emotional Memories Stick
For instance örneğin, the memory details that seem gibi görünmek to get remembered best are often the most emotional ones, Payne said.
Payne and colleagues iş arkadaşı found that when people are shown a scene görüntü with an emotion-laden dolu object in the foreground ön tarafta—such as a wrecked mahvolmuş car—they are more likely muhtemel to remember that object than, say, palm trees in the background, especially if they are tested after a night of slumber uyuklama.
Rather than yerine preserving scenes in their entirety bütünlük, the brain apparently belli ki restructures scenes to remember only their most emotional and perhaps most important elements while allowing less emotional details to deteriorate bozulmak.
Measurements of brain activity support this notion kanı, revealing that brain regions linked with emotion and memory consolidation are more periodically active during sleep then when awake.
"It makes sense mantıklı olmak to selectively remember emotional information—our ancestors ata would not want to forget a snake was in a particular belli location or that someone in the tribe kabile was particularly mean aşağılık and should be avoided," said Payne, whose study appeared in the October issue konu of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.
"Memories are not so much about remembering the past as being able to anticipate ummak and predict ummak multiple possible futures."
Selective Memory's Dark Side
But there are dark sides to such selectivity seçicilik. For instance, the brain can focus on remembering negative experiences at the exclusion çıkarma of others, which occurs in depression and post-traumatic stress disorder düzensizlik.
Future research may shed yaymak light on what details are remembered and how they're remembered, which could help deal with ilgilenmek trauma, Payne noted.
"You could also see such work being helpful in coming up with solutions in the classroom or in the business world," she said.
Future research may also reveal what components of sleep might be linked with these mental processes.
"Does it require the REM sleep associated with dreaming, or deeper slow-wave sleep?" said Robert Stickgold, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School who researches sleep.
Overall tam, "sleep is doing much more complicated karışık stuff than just stabilizing sağlamlaştırmak or strengthening kuvvetlenmek memories," Stickgold added.