Sleep Might Help Us Remember False Memories [Study]

(Photo: Pexels/Andrea Piacquadio)
Sleep Might Help Us Remember False Memories [Study]

Having enough sleep leaves one revitalized. However, it might also lead to confusion as it can make one reportedly remember false memories.

Sleep and False Memories

The human brain's memory is infamously erratic; it frequently forgets things that were blatantly obvious or recalls events that never actually occurred. According to a recent study, sleep may aid in both true and false memory recollection.

When people are given a list of related words to memorize, they frequently develop false recollections of terms that were absent but would have matched the category.

"We found that participants had better memory for the lists in terms of better recall of the words in the lists. But their errors were also revealing-they made fewer random errors (intrusions), and more errors that suggest that they had learned the gist of the lists," said Gareth Gaskell, a professor of sleep psychology at the University of York in England.

Nearly 500 participants were examined on their capacity to remember a list of words 12 hours after viewing them. Over the 12 hours, some participants were permitted to sleep.

It was discovered that individuals who had slept had not only remembered a greater number of terms from the list than those who had not, but they also had a higher probability of providing similar words but not on the list. A list containing words like nurse, hospital, and sick can include lure words like doctor in the false memories. These linked erroneous words are called "lure words," while wholly unrelated inaccurate words are known as "intrusions."

"The results suggest an intriguing combination of effects. The sleep and wake groups were well-matched in the number of total responses after the 12-hour delay. Despite this, the sleep participants were more accurate in their veridical (truthful) memory of the studied list words, as well as more gist-like in their incorrect responses --a greater lure-to-intrusion ratio," the authors wrote.

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Women More Resilient To Sleep Deprivation Than Men

The response of female rodents to sleep deprivation was investigated in two experiments, and both revealed that women are more resilient to sleep deprivation than men.

According to one study, female mice are more robust to sleep deprivation than their male counterparts due to hormonal changes. The results of the other study showed that astrocytes, a specific type of brain cell, attenuate the influence of estrogen hormones on rats' ability to sleep.

Jessica Mong, a professor of neuropharmacology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and co-author of one of the research, estimates that 35-50% of perimenopausal/menopausal women will experience sleep issues, compared to 15% of the general population. Mong and her colleagues found that astrocyte cells, non-neuronal cells found in the preoptic region of the brain, an area linked to sleep regulation, may regulate the effects of estrogen hormones on sleep.

In the second study, researchers discovered that female mice's gene expression changed far less than male mice's following sleep deprivation. Over 1,100 genes were impacted in male mice, whereas in female mice, just 99 genes were altered.

Using an unbiased RNA sequencing technique, the authors found that females appeared more resistant to changes in gene expression in the hippocampus following acute sleep compared with similarly aged male mice. Moreover, at the proestrus stage, there was no appreciable difference in the hippocampus gene expression of sleep-deprived female mice compared to those that were not.

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