Memory, Sleep, and Dreaming: Experiencing Consolidation

“Compatible with this observation is the proposal that sleep functions to transformmemory traces in part by slowly interleaving neural representations of recent experience into existing remote and semantic cortical networks.(38,69) For example, in their influential article in Psychological Review, McCelland and colleag…”

“Second, a prominent feature of memory reactivation in rodent models is that, within NREM sleep, the strength of neural-level memory replay decays quickly across time.(26,27) Similarly, it seems that sleep mentation may be most strongly related to recent memories early in the sleep phase,(24,28,29) with this associatio…”

“While research on the “default” mode of brain function has brought attention to the importance of spontaneous brain activity occurring during periods of rest and sleep [70,71], surprisingly, virtually none of this work has examined participants' own reports of what is going through their mind at rest.”

“In recent years, an accumulating body of research evidence has definitively demonstrated that post-learning sleep is beneficial for human memory performance across a variety of tasks, including verbal learning [1–4], procedural skill learning [2,5–7], emotional memory [8,9], and spatial navigation [10,11].”

“Neuronal firing sequences established during wake are reexpressed only intermittently during rodent NREM sleep, with low fidelity and on a faster timescale than the original experience.(30,31) Similarly, only intermittent fragments of recent episodicmemories appear in sleep mentation, intermingled with remote and sema…”

“…a source of creativity, insight and problem-solving (Schredl and Erlacher, 2007), an opportunity for emotional adaptation (Cartwright et al., 1998; Lara-Carrasco et al., 2009), and an expression and potential means of memory consolidation (Nielsen and Stenstrom, 2005; Wamsley and Stickgold, 2011).”

“Some authors even speculate that REM replay may be associated with the vivid dreaming that characterises this sleep stage [67,77].”

“Dreaming could reflect the reactivation and consolidation of memories during sleep (Nielsen and Stenstrom, 2005; Wamsley and Stickgold, 2011).”

“On the neurophysiological level, dream mentation has been suggested to represent the phenomenological reflection of a neural replay of activation patterns associated with recent learning experiences (Wamsley, 2014; Wamsley Stickgold, 2011; Wilson McNaughton, 1994).”