Relationship Between Sleep and Memory Consolidation

Abstract

Sleep and memory are complex phenomena that are not fully understood, and the underlying mechanisms are still not fully understood. Besides being an adaptive behavior, sleep can modulate plasticity in the brain at the level of synaptic connections between neurons and neuronal plasticity affects sleep. Understanding how sleep is modulated by internal and external stimuli and how sleep modulates memory and plasticity is a key question in neuroscience. Sleep is characterized as a brain state that optimizes the memory consolidation. Although the initial encoding of a memory is a fast process, its long-term maintenance requires processes that continue to replace relevant data for hours or even years. The general name of this process is memory consolidation and the replacement of existing memories is the reconsolidation process. Memory consolidation refers to a process in which unstable newly formed memory traces are progressively transformed into long-term memories and become more resistant to interaction, although they may remain susceptible to further updates and modifications. Consolidation results from the reactivation of recently encoded neuronal memory representations that occur during slow-wave activity and transform the relevant representations into long-term memory for integration. Continued rapid eye movement sleep can stabilize transformed memories. According to recent research, sleep-related consolidation processes can be placed in different sizes for different types of memory. Slow wave activity, which is restorative sleep, is hypothesized to play an important role in memory by processing and consolidating newly acquired information. In this review, general research was conducted on the relationship between sleep and memory.

Keywords

• sleep
• memory
• consolidation
• reconsolidation
• slow wave activity