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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday March 18 2018, @02:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the we-can-remember-it-for-you-wholesale dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

During the hours of sleep the memory performs a cleaning shift. A study led by a Spanish scientist at the University of Cambridge reveals that when we sleep, the neural connections that collect important information are strengthened and those created from irrelevant data are weakened until they get lost.

Throughout the day, people retain a lot of information. The brain creates or modifies the neural connections from these data, elaborating memories. But most of the information we receive is irrelevant and it does not make sense to keep it. In such a case, the brain would be overloaded.

So far there have been two hypotheses about how the sleeping brain modifies the neural connections created throughout the day: while one of them argues that all of them are reinforced during sleep hours, the other maintains that their number is reduced.

[...] According to the expert, in the event that all these links were reinforced equally during sleep, the brain would be saturated by an extreme overexcitement of the nervous system.

In the study, published in the Neuron journal, the researchers stimulated the neuronal connections of mice subjected to a type of anesthesia that achieves a brain state similar to the slow wave sleep phase in humans.

[...] The results show that during slow wave sleep, the largest connections are maintained while the smaller ones are lost. This brain mechanism improves the signal-to-noise ratio -- important information remains and the dispensable is discarded -- and allows the storage of various types of information from one day to the next without losing the previous data. That is, those that have already been considered relevant are kept in that state without having to reinforce them. According to González Rueda, the brain "puts order" during the hours of sleep, discarding the weakest connections to ensure stronger and consolidated memories.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180315110640.htm


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday March 19 2018, @01:20PM

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Monday March 19 2018, @01:20PM (#654867) Journal

    Your story actually very much shows why sleep is utterly necessary. It appears to me that sleep deprivation eventually results in incorrect associational pathways. Fail to sleep and eventually you make a fatal mistake. Other aspects of biochemistry also occur.

    I think I see what you are saying - they body can continue to function despite a lack of sleep. But you learned that any body pays a price for that. There is one very rare condition [wikipedia.org] that appears to be invariably fatal for those who literally cannot sleep.

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