Good sleep, secret behind retrieving lost skills

Washington, Nov 18: Feeling sad that you forgot all those skills which you took so much pain to learn. Well hear is a remedy for getting them back. Sleep well and retrieve your skills! Sounds interesting right? According to a research at the University of Chicago, a good sleep at night not only helps people learn complicated tasks, but also helps them recover skills they otherwise thought they had forgotten over the course of a day.

Sleep helps the mind learn complicated tasks and helps people recover learning they otherwise thought they had forgotten over the course of a day, research at the University of Chicago shows. For the study, researchers tested about 200 college students, most of whom were women, who had little previous experience playing video games. And they showed for the first time that people, who had 'forgotten' how to perform a complex task 12 hours after training, had those abilities restored after a night's sleep.

"Sleep consolidated learning by restoring what was lost over the course of a day following training and by protecting what was learned against subsequent loss. These findings suggest that sleep has an important role in learning generalized skills in stabilizing and protecting memory," said Howard Nusbaum, Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago, and a researcher in the study.

According to the findings, this consolidation may help in learning language processes such as reading and writing as well as eye-hand skills such as tennis.

The scientists made the students learn video games containing a rich, multisensory virtual environment in which players must use both hands to deal with continually changing visual and auditory signals. The first-person navigation games require learning maps of different environments.

In the study, they used first-person shooter games, with the goal of killing enemy bots (software avatars that play against the participant) while avoiding being killed.

The subjects were given a pre-test to determine their initial performance level on the games. They were then trained to play the games and later tested on their performance.

One group was trained in the morning and then tested 12 hours later after being awake for that time. A second group was trained in the morning and then tested the next day, 24 hours after being trained. Another group was trained in the evening, then tested 12 hours after a night's sleep and a fourth group was trained in the evening and then also tested 24 hours after training.

The researchers observed that trained in the morning subjects showed an 8-percentage point improvement in accuracy immediately after training.

However after 12 waking hours following training, subjects lost half of that improvement when tested in the evening.

When subjects were tested the next morning 24 hours after training, they showed a 10 percentage point improvement over their pre-test performance.

"The students probably tested more poorly in the afternoon because following training, some of their waking experiences interfered with training. Those distractions went away when they slept and the brain was able to do its work," said Nusbaum.

The team reported the findings in the paper, "Consolidation of Sensorimotor Learning During Sleep," in the current issue of Learning and Memory.

ANI