UPDATE:

Snipped from the SciAm.com.

Here is an update on the phenomenon of how our brains may be consolidating — the conversion of short term memory into long term memory — our days experiences while we sleep. This helping us not only create a more solidified neural network for quicker and easier access to our memories, but also helping build more of a nuanced recall of learnt subjects or actions and their relationships.

Here is a small portion of the article that helps reinforce the previous notable article:

The scientists implanted electrodes in the brains of rats, surveying the activity of up to 120 neurons (nerve cells) in the medial prefrontal cortex (a forebrain region responsible for goal-oriented executive functions such as organizing thoughts and actions) while the animals completed a navigational task, scampering between spots in sequence on a circular table top. The research team monitored the rats’ brain activity daily for a few weeks as they scurried to complete the 50-minute running session and then napped for 20 minutes to an hour.

Using two different methods—comparing the activity between pairs of cells and surveying patterns over the entire population of monitored neurons—the team noted that neuronal activity sequences that occurred when the rats were running seemed to reappear during sleep.

“We looked at them and it just hit us in the face that there [were] striking similarities,” says David Euston, an assistant research scientist at the U.A. College of Medicine’s Division of Neural Systems, Memory and Aging.

Not only were the same patterns reactivated while snoozing, but the replay would take place six to seven times faster than when the rats performed the task. “During behavior when we’re actually interacting with the world, the brain has to go at the same speed at which the body is going,” Euston speculates. “During sleep, maybe the brain can go faster when it’s not time-locked to behavior.”

Previous notable article below …

Snipped from the NYTimes.com.

The term “sleeping on it” may mean more to the way our brains work than previously thought. Scientists are researching the differences on how the brain processes memories during sleep compared to during wakefulness. It is quite controversial among the scientists, but what some are saying is that sleep helps build stronger memories and allows for more complex and nuanced learning to take place.

These scientists had participants take a simple test to show how quickly they could learn and remember certain objects, and the object’s relationships with each other. There was a straightforward portion of the test that the participants learned in 20 minutes and could remember very well, but there was a second portion that needed a little more thought to figure out. The object’s relationships for the second portion was not directly taught, therefor, less straightforward and took a more solidified memory to figure out. “It’s hazy,” says the participants. “Hazy, that is, until you sleep on it.”

These findings are a good sign for the neuroscientists that have been studying sleep. There is finally some light at the end of a dark tunnel that has existed for more than 40 years. After the discovery of ‘Rapid Eye Movements’ in the ’50s, there was nothing. That is, until now. Here is some portions of the article:

Here is a small portion of the article:

Study pairs of Easter eggs on a computer screen and memorize how the computer has arranged them: the aqua egg over the rainbow one, the paisley over the coral one — and there are just six eggs in all.

Most people can study these pairs for about 20 minutes and ace a test on them, even a day later. But they’re much less accurate in choosing between two eggs that have not been directly compared: Aqua trumped rainbow but does that mean it trumps paisley? It’s hazy.

It’s hazy, that is, until you sleep on it.

In a study published in May, researchers at Harvard and McGill Universities reported that participants who slept after playing this game scored significantly higher on a retest than those who did not sleep. While asleep they apparently figured out what they didn’t while awake: the structure of the simple hierarchy that linked the pairs, paisley over aqua over rainbow, and so on.

“We think what’s happening during sleep is that you open the aperture of memory and are able to see this bigger picture,” said the study’s senior author, Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist who is now at the University of California, Berkeley. He added that many such insights occurred “only when you enter this wonder-world of sleep.”

Now, a small group of neuroscientists is arguing that at least one vital function of sleep is bound up with learning and memory. A cascade of new findings, in animals and humans, suggest that sleep plays a critical role in flagging and storing important memories, both intellectual and physical, and perhaps in seeing subtle connections that were invisible during waking — a new way to solve a math or Easter egg problem, even an unseen pattern causing stress in a marriage.

The theory is controversial, and some scientists insist that it’s still far from clear whether the sleeping brain can do anything with memories that the waking brain doesn’t also do, in moments of quiet contemplation. …

“During waking we have a thousand things happening at once, the library is filling up, and we can’t possibly process it all,” Dr. Datta said. While awake the brain is also gathering lots of valuable information subconsciously, he said, without the person’s ever being aware of it.

“It’s during sleep that we have this special condition to clear away this overload, and these REM processes then help store what’s important,” Dr. Datta said. …

Dreams still defy scientific measurement but they, too, have a place in the evolving theory of sleep-dependent learning.

It is likely during REM, some scientists argue, that the brain proceeds to mix, match and juggle the memory traces it has preserved, looking for hidden connections that help make sense of the world. Life experience is cut up and reordered, sifted and shuffled again. This process could account for the cockeyed, disjointed scenes that occur during dreams: the kaleidoscope of distilled experience is being turned. …

To hear some people tell it, a night’s sleep changed their world. It was reportedly during sleep that the Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements tumbled into place. Friedrich August Kekule, a 19th-century chemist, said he worked out the chemical structure of the benzine ring — an important discovery — when he dreamed of a snake biting its tail. Athletes, including the golfer Jack Nicklaus, have also talked about insight coming during sleep. …

“It does make sense these insights come during REM,” Dr. Walker said. “I mean, what better time to play out all these different scenarios and solutions and ideas than in dreams, where there are no consequences?”

The problem, he and others say, is how to study it. That, most neuroscientists agree, will take some very creative thinking — both of the daytime and nighttime kind.