Sleep helps to protect older memories.
Continual learning poses a challenge to academics researching neural networks.
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.
Source: ucsd.edu, elifesciences.org