If you’ve been struggling to get a good night’s sleep, you’re not the only one. Final Thoughts on Affirmations for Sleep.Why Affirmations Are Important for Sleep.After all, dreams are a different way of recombining aspects of past experience. "But I suspect there might be a connection. Schacter, who also presented Friday at the psychology convention, has found that the same areas in the brain that handle memory, such as the hippocampus, show increased activity when subjects are asked to imagine future events ( interactive brain map).Ĭould REM sleep turn you into a crystal ball? "When you imagine future events, you're recombining aspects of experiences that have actually occurred," Harvard psychiatrist Daniel Schacter, whose research was separate from Mednick's, told National Geographic News. Sleep Helps Turn Memories Into Predictions?īoosted by deep sleep, an improved memory may have yet one more benefit: helping you imagine-and better plan for-the future. (Related: "Why Do We Sleep? Scientists Are Still Trying to Find Out.") Instead, REM "plays a role in helping people detach their memory of that word from being able to use that word in other contexts," she said. Mednick noted that all groups remembered the morning's answers equally well-proving that the second round wasn't just testing nappers' memorization abilities. That means that REM sleep improved participants' ability to see connections among seemingly unrelated things: the answers from the first-round analogy problems and the three words in each round-two association test, she said. Non-REM nappers and the non-nappers showed no improvement on these problems, said Mednick, of the University of California, San Diego, who presented her findings Friday in San Diego at the American Psychological Association's annual convention. On the second-round questions whose answers matched first-round answers-for example, "sweet" and "sweet"-the REM nappers improved their performances by 40 percent. For example, given "cookie," "heart," and "sixteen," the answer would have been "sweet." The correct answers to many of the second-round questions were the same as the solutions to analogy questions from round one. In a typical second-round test, participants were asked to guess what single word is associated with three seemingly unrelated words. There was a second round of tests in the afternoon. (Related: "Secrets of Sleeping Soundly Uncovered.") A third group rested quietly but didn't sleep. Some participants took naps with REM sleep, which typically begins more than an hour after a person falls asleep. For example, given "chips: salty::candy:_" the answer would have been "sweet."Īt midday, after the first round, the subjects were given a 90-minute rest period, during which they were monitored. Part of the experiment's morning round involved a word-analogy test, similar to some SAT problems. That is, the REM, or rapid eye movement, sleep helped people combine ideas in new ways, according to psychiatrist Sara Mednick, who led the study. In a recent study, people who took naps featuring REM sleep-in which dreams are most vivid-performed better on creativity-oriented word problems. (Also see: "Naps Clear Brain's Inbox, Improve Learning.") Here's more evidence that sleep, including napping, can make you smarter.ĭreaming may improve memory, boost creativity, and help you better plan for the future, new research suggests.
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