Media release

From: Society for Neuroscience

Here’s another perk of sleep to add to your list

Aligning sleep with training sessions in rehabilitation programs may enhance motor recovery following injury.

Sleep enhances how well we retain autobiographical memories, such as a pleasant memory of riding your bike with a friend. Until now, its role in how well we retain unconscious memories, like the act of riding a bike, was unclear. Valeria Della-Maggore of the University of Buenos Aires recently led a study to explore this. They investigated how sleep contributes to an aspect of motor skill learning called sensorimotor adaptation, which refers to the ability to perform motor skills in changing environmental and internal conditions (this is how you are able to ride your bike in conditions beyond the ones in which you initially learned how to ride). Prior to their study, these kinds of memories were thought to develop independent of sleep. Using a cohort of nearly 300 people, the scientists discovered that sensorimotor adaptation memories became stronger and more long-term separately through the passage of time and sleep. Importantly, when sleep occurred shortly after training in experimental tasks, long-term memory of newly acquired motor skills was strengthened by 30%. This was linked to specific neural markers of long-term memory formation associated with sleep that are typically linked to autobiographical memory enhancement. These findings may inform rehabilitation programs, suggesting that aligning training sessions with sleep could speed up motor recovery and improve recovery outcomes after injury.