Study reveals how sleep boosts learning

Scientists have long known that a good night’s sleep works wonders for our ability to learn new skills.

What has been less clear is the role of different sleep stages. In particular, there has been controversy over the relative contributions of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is when most dreaming occurs, and non-REM sleep, which is mostly dreamless.

Now, a study by psychologists of the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University in Providence, RI, provides important clues that could help resolve the debate.

Their experiment — which focuses on visual learning — suggests that rather than one stage being more important than the other for learning new skills, both play essential and complementary neurochemical processing roles.

They found that while non-REM sleep enhances our performance of newly acquired skills by restoring flexibility, REM sleep stabilizes those improvements, and prevents them from being overwritten by subsequent learning.

“I hope this helps people realize that both non-REM sleep and REM sleep are important for learning,” says corresponding author Yuka Sasaki, a professor of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown. 

Most REM sleep occurs in the final hours of sleep, so the finding reinforces the importance of not cutting short these later stages.

“When people sleep at night, there are many sleep cycles. REM sleep appears at least three, four, five times, and especially in the later part of the night. We want to have lots of REM sleep to help us remember more robustly, so we shouldn’t shorten our sleep.”

– Prof. Yuka Sasaki

The research is published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Twin benefits

Psychologists have previously identified two distinct benefits of sleep for learning.

The first benefit, which they call “offline performance gains,” means the learning acquired before sleep is enhanced after sleep, without any additional training.

The second benefit, called “resilience to interference,” protects the skills learned before sleep from being disrupted or overwritten by subsequent learning after awaking.

To reap both benefits, there is a trade-off between flexibility and stability.

Learning during the day involves forming new synapses, which are the electrical connections between nerve cells, and the strengthening of existing synapses through repeated use.

While we sleep, the brain appears to streamline its operations to work more efficiently. According to a leading hypothesis, it does this by reactivating synapses that have been strengthened during the day, and then indiscriminately ‘downscales’ or weakens them all.

This restores flexibility, or plasticity, to the brain’s local connections and wider networks, to improve overall performance.

At the same time, during sleep, the brain must also stabilize key synapses to prevent what was learned the previous day from being eliminated by new learning experiences.