How Memory Affects The Brain

The average person spends more than one-third of their life sleeping, and over this period of time he or she can have as many as 1,825 dreams (Wicklinski). By definition, dreams are mental images, thoughts, or emotions that are experienced while sleeping. In the beginning, dreams were thought to be messages sent from the gods or spirit world. Researchers now have many theories explaining why people dream. Many of these theories believe that dreams can resemble an individual’s sensory experiences or even secret wishes. All people dream, but only forty-two percent can recall their dreams from the night before (“Dreams”). Dreaming is important because it can impact people’s health, provide insight into what they are feeling, and reveal

TRANSITION: Now that we saw what functions in the brain during a dream we can better understand the significance

Methods: The participants, all males age 23-32, slept in a dark, quiet lab while their brain waves and eye movements were recorded. They were not aloud to sleep at all during the day when they were not in the lab because they might dream. To establish a base for the experiment, participants in the study were allowed to sleep normally for a few nights. The next few nights the participants were fully awaken every time that they started to dream. The next section was the recovery phase where they could sleep normally followed by more nights where they would be woken between

Nishida, M., Pearsall, J., Buckner, R. L., & Walker, M. P. (2009). REM sleep, prefrontal theta, and the consolidation of human emotional memory. Cerebral Cortex, 19(5), 1158-1166.

Although newborn infants spend about half of their sixteen to eighteen hours of sleep time a day in REM sleep, adults spend only about an hour and a half in REM sleep. (1) This difference in both amount and percentage of REM sleep between infants and adults indicates the importance of REM sleep, or of dreams, in development. Several dream researchers have hypothesized that REM sleep may play an important role in infant brain development by providing an internal source of powerful stimulation which would prepare the baby for the almost infinite "world of stimulation it will soon have to face" and also by facilitating the "maturation of the nervous system." (1)

However, memory storing is when information comes into memory system and stored in specific brain cells. The hippocampus is the most magnificent element in memory. In fact, the hippocampus is located in the medial temporal lobe of the brain (Ananya, 2014). Also new memories are stored in hippocampus without hippocampus the brain cannot store or retrieved memories (According to the scientific of America, 2009). Furthermore, there are three ways in which memories can be store by visual, acoustic, and semantic. For instance, people memorize a phone number when they have looked up in phone book if so they using visual coding, but if they repeating it after looked up they probably using acoustic coding (Mclead, 2007). Memory is stored by a small

In this article, researchers used three studies to attempt to determine if sleep affects declarative memory (Schönauer, Pawlizki, Köck, & Gais, 2014). The study seems to test an association between the variables of sleep and declarative memory, and the study attempts to make the casual claim that “Sleep does not preferentially consolidate a specific kind of declarative memory, but consistently promotes overall declarative memory formation” (Schönauer et al., 2014, para. 5). The overall validity of this experiments appears to be quite strong, as the researchers appeared to carefully measure their variables and prioritized the different validities in order to achieve an accurate result.

Memory formation can be described as the process through which neuronal activity produces long-term synaptic changes (Hebb, 1949), and involves both encoding and consolidation. Sleep consists of rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep and non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, with the latter including slow wave sleep (SWS). Predominantly, sleep plays a role in the consolidation of new memories, but also benefits encoding via increases in concentration (Sarode, et al., 2013). The extent of these benefits depends on a number of factors including the duration and time of sleep after learning (Diekelmann, Wilhelm, & Born, 2009). SWS and REM sleep also influence memory formation, with

Lucid Dreaming is an important research findings in psychology today because it shows how much your conscious mind is capable of during sleeping. Reasons that support this includes, reducing nightmares, having control over your consciousness, and being able to make sleeping

Remembering past events is such a fascinating process the human brain creates, known as memories. Recalling delightful experiences make living ecstatic, however; remembering the tragic events can make living miserable. Recollecting the pleasant and forgetting the unpleasant memories, both are essential for normal living. This makes memory is a tool that is crucial to the daily lives of human beings. People believe memories are accurate and precise; however, memories are not like a video camera, making them unreliable. The human brain is the most complex organ in the human body and a memory is just a small fraction of its function. What is memory and how can Alzheimer’s affect a memory?

explicit, and non-declarative, i.e. procedural or implicit, memory in man. Sleep is composed of two prominent stages, namely REM sleep and NREM sleep, the latter being subdivided into SWS and Stage 2 sleep in humans. These stages of sleep differ by many factors including their temporal distribution and regulation, the pattern of neuronal activity, the specific neurotransmitter and neurochemical changes, and regional brain activity. Up to now, four experimental approaches have been used to test the hypothesis of the processing of memory traces during sleep: (1) the effects of post-training sleep deprivation on memory consolidation, (2) the effects of learning on post-training sleep, (3) the effects of within sleep stimulation on the sleep pattern and overnight memories, and (4) the re-expression of behavior-specific neural patterns during post-training sleep. These studies, which we review here, actually suggest that REM and NREM sleep stages could have memory-related functions. On this basis, not all types of memories seem to rely on the same stage of sleep for

Allan Hobson proposed neuroscience perspective(all the sciences) of the dream, the activation-synthesis theory explains that dreams are a result of “the electrical energy that the brain produces during REM sleep, possibly as a result of changes in the production of particular neurotransmitters.” The electrical energy randomly triggers the memories stored in the brain because the brain tries to “make sense of neutral activity” that happens during sleep. The brain tries to put the event that occurred in chronological order to make a logical story “ filling in the gaps to produce a rational

Memory plays a big role in our life. It is the processes by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved. Everything we see, we do, we think, will goes to memory and transform to implicit or explicit memory. Which will be saved in our brain. We could recall it anytime, even I’m using my implicit memory to type this report. Simply, our daily life is formed by memory, without it, we’re nothing. Why? If we don’t have memory, we can’t learn.

Dreams are sophisticated, powerful, primal works of art created by your inner healer and artist: the unconscious. Your hidden artist weaves past, present and future into intricate and bizarre patterns that on the surface may seem to make no sense, and yet are strangely compelling. From its unlimited palette of

“A night of sleep is as much preparation for the subsequent day’s activity as it is recovery from that of the previous day” -Allan Hobson. The science behind dreaming has been an unexplained controversy for many years, however, Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley presented a theory called activation-synthesis model of dreaming to explain how millions of people drift off into a dream. According to these psychiatrists, the “REM sleep triggers neural activity that evokes random visual memories, which our sleeping brain weaves into stories.” Their constructed hypothesis describe my dreams and how they correlate to my memories from my day.