For many years, people believed that the brain, like the body, rested during sleep. After all, we are rendered unconscious by sleep. Perhaps, it was thought, the brain just needs to stop thinking for a few hours every day. Wrong. During sleep, our brain – the organ that directs us to sleep – is itself extraordinarily active. And much of that activity helps the brain to learn, to remember and to make connections.
It wasn’t so long ago that the rueful joke in research circles was that everyone knew sleep had something to do with memory – except for the people who study sleep and the people who study memory. Then, in 1994, Israeli researchers reported that the average performance for a group of people on a memory test improved when the test was repeated after a break of many hours – during which some subjects slept and others did not. In 2000, a Harvard team demonstrated that this improvement occurred only during sleep.
(Newsweek, May 4, 2009, p.33)
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