Sleep's purpose - to enhance brain power

- Fri, 14 Sep 2007

It's been one of the human body's greatest mysteries - why do we need sleep? Now comes significant proof that while our body is resting our brain goes into overdrive, sorting out all the memories of the previous day and absorbing their meaning.

"We're not just stabilising memories during sleep, we're extracting the meaning," Professor BobStickgold told London's Daily Mail. He led a study at  Harvard University where participants were shown a range of symbols. After sleep, the participants werefar more quickly able to identify themes and patterns in the symbols than they were beforehand.

"People have been puzzling for years about what the purpose of sleep is. What we now know is that sleep serves the function of a tidying process," added psychology professor John Groeger.

"It's as if the brain plays all the day's experiences in a type of weird fast forward and then sorts them out saying, this goes with that, I'm going to sort this in that place. We store a huge number of experiences in the head every day and sleep seems to be the way we cope with it all," Professor Groeger added.

Sleep is just one of the ways in which we can stabilise memory which naturally starts to deteriorate as we age. Scientists have found that we can train and strengthen the memory pathways in our brain by doing regular memory  exercises which act like aerobics for the brain. Headstrong offers scientifically developed brain-training games that can keep our memory in peak condition as we age.