学进去

In my teenage period 1 always had wished to pass a geography exam, remembering all the locations of the countries on a map or avoid embarrassing situations of suddenly forgetting the person’s name standing right in front of you. Luckily for me, now one theory that memory, like other muscles in the body, can be strengthened aroused my curiosity. But instead of practicing with flash cards, there may be an interesting way that we can improve our memory while we sleep.

The researchers hold that sleep is when the brain transfers short-term memories experienced throughout the day into long-term memories. This process is called memory consolidation. They have been working on a DIY version of this task to see if we male volunteers can improve memories through the use of sound in sleep. In the test, every time we see the picture, we can hear the related sound. Then we take a nap and they record our EEG.

They’re interested in one of the four periods of sleep: slow-wave sleep, when scientists believe that memory consolidation can happen. In this deep period of sleep, they do something that we don’t know. When we wake back up and do the task again, we find we do better than before a nap. That is because they played a clue during our sleep, for example, a car — we would remember the position of that car when we woke back up again. But if they didn’t play the clue during the sleep, for example, a guitar, we’d be less likely to remember that guitar when we woke up.

I was a huge skeptic when I first heard that result. But they ran this experiment on two female groups and the results were significant. It’s not that you remember things better; it’s that you forget them less. And the facts and memories we collect throughout the day are easily lost and forgotten.

So if you’re like me and a bit forgetful, perhaps a solution is a pair of headphones and a soft couch.