Sleep helps to protect older memories.

Continual learning poses a challenge to academics researching neural networks.

Sleep helps to protect older memories.
sleep protects memory

by Oscar C González, Yury Sokolov, Giri P Krishnan, Jean Erik Delanois, Maxim Bazhenov.

Main titles

  • The brain creates ways to protect older memories from being changed by new information.
  • The study hypothesizes that sleep facilitates the retention of older memories.
  • Simulating sleep was found to reverse any damage to older memories, and enhanced both newer and older memories.
  • Sleep encourages neural network synergy, allowing overlapping and increased storage.
  • This dynamic nature of sleep allows older memories to combine more effectively with newer memory traces, and facilitates continual learning.

sleep and consolidating memories

Source: ucsd.edu, elifesciences.org