Studies have shown that memories related to skills and facts are consolidated during sleep - and at different stages of sleep.
Sports
When NBA All-Star Player Andre Iguodala was getting 8 hrs of sleep, he saw:
Even famous players like Usain Bolt, Roger Federer, and Lebron James all get above 9 hours of sleep.
<aside> 🏅 Sleep helps improve athletic performance.
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Learning new syllables
In 1924, 2 German scientists, Jenkins and Dalenbach, create a test where two participants had to learn 10 nonsense syllables. They would conduct tests at different times after a learning session. They were first was tested after 0, 1, 2,4 and 8 hours after a learning session, and then again but tested after 0 , 1 , 2, 4 and 8 hours of sleep after a learning session.
purple = with sleep, red = without sleep
From this, we can see at around 2 hours of sleep, memories are consolidated. Without sleep, there is catastrophic learning, where after 8 hours, some have forgotten the material.
<aside> 🎒 Sleep helps retain memories
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Visual Tasks
In a visual discrimination task, 6 groups of people were trained over many trials to point out differences, each with different retest days ranging from the same day to five days after.
Studies showed that there was no significant improve for those who retested the same day. After one night of sleep, there was a significant improvement in performance, and increases over time.
There was also a group who was sleep deprived in the first night, and then slept more during the second day, and tested on the third. However, it showed that there was little improvement in performance.
Sleep is necessary for memory consolidation within the first 24 hours.
<aside> 🏦 Sleep is not like a bank, you cannot "pay off" sleep.
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