Remembering to execute goals in the future (prospective memory) is important for both social reasons and personal ones. It’s a ubiquitous memory challenge, and one that is often not successfully accomplished. Could sleeping after goal encoding promote later execution?
Michael K. Scullin and Mark A. McDaniel of the Washington University in St. Louis evaluated this possibility by instructing 24 university students to execute a prospective memory goal after a short delay (20 min), a 12-hr wake delay, or a 12-hr sleep delay.
The researchers found that the participants who slept after processing and storing the idea of a planned task were more likely to carry out their intentions than those who tried to tackle their plan after the 12-hr wake delay.
The sleep-enhanced goal execution was not accompanied by a decline in performance of an ongoing task in which the prospective memory goal was embedded, which suggests that the effect was not a consequence of attentional resources being reallocated from the ongoing task to the prospective memory goal.
They also found that the ability to follow through on a planned action isn't so much a function of how firmly that intention is embedded in the memory. It's actually a place, situation or circumstance encountered the next day that triggers a person's recall of their intended action.
The researchers believe their results suggest that consolidation processes active during sleep increase the probability that a goal will be spontaneously retrieved and executed.
They believe that this process occurs during slow wave sleep (an early pattern in the sleep cycle) when the hippocampus (which plays a critical role in memory formation) is reactivating these recently learned memories, taking them up and placing them in the cortical regions (which are key to memory storage) in the brain.
Journal Reference:
Scullin M, McDaniel M. Remembering to Execute a Goal: Sleep on It! Psychological Science, Early Online Publication June 2, 2010
Never Underestimate The Value of a Good Night’s Rest and the importance that sleep plays in your daily life. Improving your sleep will improve your overall life.
A simple wa
y to improve how you sleep at night is to improve your diet. If you eat a well-balanced diet you should find that you have no problem with vitamin deficiencies. proper balance is key when it comes to nutrition. Simply missing some Vitamins, such as B Vitamins, can cause fatigue, irritability and poor concentration.
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