Dreams Reinforce New Learning

In that previous studies have established that post-learning sleep consolidates memories and thus benefits memory performance, Robert Stickgold, from Harvard  Medical School (Massachusetts, USA), and colleagues reveal that dreaming helps us process newly learned knowledge.  The team enrolled 99 study participants, asking them to play a video game involving a maze through which they were to navigate via the assistance of a three-dimensional depiction of it.  After playing the ngame, the subjects either stayed awake for two hours or took a nap; they then played the maze game again five hours later.  The team noted that four participants reported dreaming about the maze while they napped, and these subjects were among those with the greatest improvement in playing the maze game for the second time, improving 10 times as much as others who napped.  Proposing that: “Dreaming about a learning experience during non-REM sleep would be associated with improved performance on a hippocampus-dependent spatial memory task,” the researchers conclude that: “These observations suggest that sleep-dependent memory consolidation in humans is facilitated by the offline reactivation of recently formed memories, and furthermore that dream experiences reflect this memory processing. That similar effects were not observed during wakefulness suggests that these mnemonic processes are specific to the sleep state.”