Sleep And Memory Essay: How Sleep Affects Memory

As living animals, we all experience a phenome known as sleep. Although we all experience sleep, very little is known about it, especially when it comes to how it affects memory. As college students, sleep is vital to our health and wellbeing, we need the right amount of sleep to be able to be awake and attentive during classes. But the question remains, how does sleep affect our memory? Does the lack of sleep a person is getting make it harder for their brains to process and store information? While researching this topic, I came across some information that might help us to better understand just exactly how sleep affects our memory. Firstly, is there a specific amount of sleep that a person needs to acquire to help maintain memory activity? In a study done at the Harvard Medical School, the conducted a survey to find out if there is a certain number of hours of sleep that are needed to maintain memory. For this

In this test, twenty-four volunteers were asked to memorize fifteen pairs of cards, during the memorization process they were also exposed to a slightly unpleasant odor, which was intended to act as an associational cue (Kelmm). After the first session, half of the group was told to stay awake while the other half were allowed to nap. The awake group were exposed to the odor cue for twenty minutes before starting the second session, while the sleep group got the odor during the last twenty minutes of the nap (Kelmm). Forty minutes later, the same volunteers were asked to learn a different set of cards, this was to act as an interfering disruptor. When asked to recall the first set of cards, the sleep group got 85% correct versus the awake group who only got 60% correct (Kelmm). The researchers found that the brain was able to process the information and store it correctly while a person was