Ib Extended Essay: Dreams and Memory Consolidation

The acquisition process of learning and experiencing is hindered due to lack of focus and attention. It is difficult to obtain information when the mind cannot focus on what is being taught. Students pick up on parts of the lesson which enable them to gain deeper understanding of the overall topic. Consolidation is a function of sleep that represents the brain's ability to retain memories. Sleep is crucial to help retain information effectively so they can be recalled back in the future. This procedure takes place in our sleep by strengthening the nerve connections in our brain to make our memory sharp. Sleep allows the brain to process factual information and procedural memories of the day, which are then imprinted in our long-term memory. An increase in sleep can dramatically enhance the brain’s ability to consolidate memories. When it comes time to recalling back on memories, memory retention can be improved with sleep. Studies show that after a good night of sleep or naps, people performed memory tasks better. Jeffery Ellbogen from Harvard Medical School, performed an experiment on 60 healthy students. The group was given 20 pairs of random words to memorize within one day and return back for a test. Ten people had to memorize the pairs without any sleep and the other half after a well-rested night of sleep. As a result, sleepers did significantly better over the non-sleepers. The sufficiently rested sleepers accurately memorized on an average of 94 percent of the pairing, compared to an 82 percent average of the sleepless group. Information is more easily remembered when enough sleep is obtained. Getting enough sleep daily is crucial to help store more valuable information in our memory for a longer

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

Dreaming, although a substantial component of our nighttime lives, remains somewhat of an enigma due to the fact that it occurs while we are unconscious. The inaccessibility of the unconscious mind weakens full analysis and comprehension of dreaming which researchers have been attempting to accomplish. However, over the years many researchers have elucidated many mysteries about dreams, such as when we dream, why we dream, and what we dream about, in order to bring forth an understanding of dreams as well as identify

This paper examines five different sources of information that addresses information pertaining to wakeful resting or sleeping and the effects it has on memory garnered by experiments performed on humans and animals. Wakeful resting is defined as an individual that has not fallen asleep but has engaged in a period of rest that cuts them off from the distractions of the outside world. Sleep is the bodies natural cycle of rest that suspends the consciousness and allows both the body and the mind to take a break from any stressful activities and recover. By either taking a short wakeful rest or going to sleep after learning new material, memory consolidation in both humans and animals will be improved, and it is not limited to humans that

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

There have been many experiments performed trying to find the correlation between sleep and memory. One of these experiments has showed that different stages of sleep has different effects on memory for instance, not only has sleep been seen to combine new memory with old long-term memories, but also helps stabilize memory (Born & Rasch, 2013). Using the Memory Interference Test (MIT), Amir conducted an experiment to further confirm the conclusion that the sleep improves a person’s memory. The experiment compared the amount of correctly remembered pictures by a sample people who had eight hours of sleep compared to a sample with only four hours of sleep. The hypothesis is that there is a correlation between the amount of sleep a person

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.

Most studies are about discovering the contributors of false memories. However, this study focuses on how sleep deprivation contributes to false memories even though many studies argue that sleep deprivation damages cognitive function. Their study went in detail by researching the effect encoding have during this process. They found that if a participant was sleep deprived during event encoding; he or she would increase the likelihood of falsifying memories. However, when the participant was sleep deprived after encoding had already occurred then there was no big impact on falsifying memories. These experiments are conducted on the effect of sleep deprivation contributing to false memories since false memories can have dreadful consequences.

As we lay ourselves down every night to put our bodies to rest, our brains begin doing something extraordinary. It begins piecing together images, creating scenarios, simulating sensory perception, and adding in emotions and fears. They can make us wake up with a smile on our face or in a cold sweat. Dreaming is such a strange and often inexplicable phenomenon, but something we all do just about every night. People have theorized the process and the utility of dreams for centuries. However, much of the accepted knowledge we have a bout dreams today is still only theory. In fact, hardly anything about the dreaming experience is concrete because it is an experience

Some people claim to be able to remember their dreams very well. Most people admit to having a hard time remembering parts of dream or even dreaming at all. Along with many other aspects of dreaming this is a debatable topic between researchers. There are many theories as to why we can’t remember our dreams. Some of the most notable that I came across come from philosophers dating back to as early as the 1800s. Hobson did a good job of bringing up various theories from famous philosophers such as Sigmund Freud. One possibility is that our brain’s neuro-chemicals during sleep are very different from when we wake up and so they don’t allow us to consolidate

During states of arousal and wakefulness, information is encoded in the neocortical and hippocampal networks in the form of memories (Frankland et al., 2005). The networks that are activated during wakefulness are subsequently reactivated during SWS via SWA, which leads to synaptic downscaling and memory consolidation. A study conducted by Peigneux and colleagues (2004) provided evidence that presents a positive association between improvement in post-sleep retrieval activity performance and the amount of hippocampal SWA that an individual experiences during SWS. This study suggests a correlation between the reactivation of wake-active neuronal networks via SWA and memory improvement during SWS. In addition to the overnight evaluation of memory consolidation, short-term evaluation of memory across the first day, which included a 90 minute sleep period between training and performance of the retrieval activity, also demonstrated a positive correlation between the amount of SWA that occurred during the sleep period and the success of the retrieval activity performance (Peigneux et al., 2004). Moreover, a study conducted by Marshall and colleagues (2004), also examined the manipulation of memory consolidation during sleep and found a positive association between hippocampal SWA and the performance of a

Frenda, Patihis, Loftus, Lewis and Fenn’s (2014) article titled “Sleep Deprivation and False Memories sought out to explanation how sleep deprivation can have a role in an individual’s cognitive function. One-way researchers went about unraveling this particular question was to uncover the invisible knowledge relating the formation of false memories with sleep deprivation. Two experiments were executed diving into the many ways that sleep deprivation can affect a person’s thoughts and general decisions, using many examples.

An abundance of research has been generated on sleep and why it occurs, with results suggesting that dreaming may partially explain the phenomenon. Though results have failed to discover the primary function of sleep, they have unveiled dreaming as a secondary function, which despite not being fundamental for survival possesses a great deal of utility nonetheless. While the primary function of dreaming, much like the primary function of sleep, remains ambiguous; a number of theories and empirical studies have proposed secondary functions relevant to waking life. The threat simulation theory, for example, postulates that dreaming serves an evolutionary function, thought to have heightened survival and reproductive success in the Pleistocene era. The theory purports that dreaming allows for an endogenous simulation of potential threats, which rehearses the cognitive mechanisms necessary for threat perception and avoidance in reality (Valli, Revonsuo, Pälkäs, Ismail, Ali, & Punamäki, 2005; Arnulf, Grosliere, Le Corve, Golmard, Lascols & Duguet, 2014). Additionally, the continuity theory posits that dreams mirror waking life experiences, thus serving a predictive function. In accordance to this theory, dream imagery can be used to predict wellbeing, and diagnose depression and anxiety (Miller, DeCicco, Fox, & McCourt, 2015; DeCicco, Lyons, Pannier, Wright, & Clarke, 2010; Michels, Schilling, Rausch, Eifler, Zink, Meyer-Lindenberg, & Schredl, 2014). Lastly, dreams have a

Hippocampus is known to play an essential role in encoding and consolidation of acquired memory. While encoding is mostly attributed to animal's waking experience, sleep is believed to support memory consolidation. In support of this theory, the two-stage model predicts 'replay' of wake-induced neural activity in sleep for long term storage. However, one that is debated is how long the hippocampus needs to reverberate the encoded information for long term storage. Some studies have provided a time constant of around ~1hr for the reactivation. However, based on other studies, this timescale of reactivation is put under question. We report here evidences for reactivation in hippocampus continuing for time scales much longer than 1 hr. In addition,

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