Sleep may clear the decks for next day’s learning
Fruit fly studies find that snoozing prunes connections between brain cells
You snooze, you lose connections between brain cells, two new studies suggest.
People have known for some time that getting enough sleep is crucial for proper brain function. “If you don’t get enough sleep your ability to acquire, process and recall information is going to be impaired,” says Paul Shaw, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis and coauthor of one of the new studies.
But scientists debate exactly how sleep helps the brain learn and remember. Two studies appearing in the April 3 Science suggest that sleep weakens or severs connections between brain cells to make way for new information.