Fascinating experiment suggesting three conclusions: 1) Sleep, even napping, facilitates the formation of memory & learning 2) Perceived importance is influential in what is remembered/learned 3) Queues given during NREM sleep can effect what's stored Many studies have shown that sleeping causes better memory recall than not sleeping. At least one study has shown that what we believe to be more important is remembered better than what we do not believe to be important. # General Experiment Study participants were split into two groups, a napping group and a non-napping group. Members from both groups were individually given memory tasks, such as seeing 100 face-name pairs and being told to remember them, or being shown a list of words in series along with a location of the word on a screen. The napping group was then made to nap for 90 minutes. The non-napping group was free to mess around on their phone or play games. After ~2 hours, all individuals were tested on their recall. The napping group performed markedly better than the non-napping group. ![[Pasted image 20250416132122.png]] # Importance Selection Same setup as before, but the words given were labeled either as "R" or "F" for "remember" or "forget". All participants were asked to recall as many of all the words as possible. The recall for both groups showed better retention of the words labeled "R", but the napping group showed selectively better retention of R words than F words, suggesting that NREM's job of clearing your mental RAM is selective of "important" memories, not just treating all information as equal. # NREM Influence In this experiment, when the words were given, a semantically matching sound was played (e.g. "CAT" was paired up with a meow sound). During the NREM portion of the nap group's sleep, some of these sounds were played on speakers for their unconscious brains to hear. These sounds that were played *during sleep* were then found to be influential on which words were remembered. **** # More ## Source - [[Why We Sleep]]