NEUR 2P37 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Slow-Wave Sleep, Narcolepsy, Hypersomnia
5 Feb 2017
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Document Summary
Rem sleep enables us to test out activities before using them in the real world. Sleep is necessary for learning and memory. Different animals sleep for different amounts of time. All animals require sleep, but how much they need varies across species. Performance on visual discrimination tasks improves following rem sleep. A (cid:374)ap is as effective as full (cid:374)ight"s sleep for i(cid:373)provi(cid:374)g perfor(cid:373)a(cid:374)ce. Reactivation of memories during sleep may aid long-term encoding. The information replayed during sleep may influence what we later remember. Researchers found that taking a 60 to 90-minute nap significantly decreased the time needed to find a target among distractors. If either was missing there was no benefit. This was only true in those who achieved both sws and rem. Learning repetitive tasks relies on rem sleep to improve performance. Slow wave sleep is important for rehearsal and learning. One theory of dreaming is that it helps us to forget.
