Take a Rest to Improve Your Memory

Posted March 15th, 2010 by John C. Oconnor

The key to a strong memory may be rest. Resting after learning something new appears to help create a stronger, more vivid memory.

Information comes from a study by NYU assistant professor of psychology Lila Davachi and doctoral candidate Arielle Tambini. The study’s purpose was to examine the relationship between two parts of the brain related to memory—the hippocampus and neocortex—and the long-term storage of memory following rest.

Resting after gaining new information allows the mind to process that information, and store it into long-term episodic memory. While former studies have shown that this process is highly effective in sleep, this experiment tested the effects of “awake rest”–rest without sleeping.

The hippocampus is responsible for regulating emotion and memory; the neocortex for language, conscious thought and emotional response. Researchers used object-face and scene-face encoding, the brain’s process of changing information from one form to another, to determine how these two areas of the brain reacted to form memories.

Participants were shown images of people coupled with either objects or scenery (called encoding tasks), and asked how likely these images were to go together. Testing began 40–50 minutes after the first encoding task and 70–80 minutes after the second.

According to Davachi, brain regions remained active during rest, which suggests that memories were being replayed and reinforced. Participants with stronger relationships between the hippocampus and neocortex had better memory, especially of the face-object pairing.

“It will be essential for future studies to assess how connectivity during post-task offline periods (rest) relates to more extended measures of long-term memory consolidation,” authors wrote. “It will be interesting to explore the relationship between longitudinal measurements of enhanced connectivity and behavioral measures of memory consolidation.”

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