Hi there, it's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast.

I want to start with a fundamental statement.

Sleep is not the absence of wakefulness. Sleep is far more than that. What I mean is that

sleep is an incredibly active state. Demonstrated by the fact that numerous functions of your brain

and also numerous functions of your body are restored by and in fact critically depend upon the presence of you getting

sufficient sleep. Now of the many benefits to your brain, sleep's role in boosting your learning and memory abilities

is both particularly impressive and especially well understood because we've now

discovered that sleep is important for memory in at least three different ways.

First we need sleep before learning in order to prepare the brain

for the initial formation of new memories. Second, we then need sleep after learning to cement those new memories

within the brain. And third, and something that we've already covered in our series on dreaming.

Sleep also not simply strengthens individual memories,

but sleep will intelligently associate and interconnect new memories together,

therefore offering the ability for creativity and ingenuity.

And in the next several episodes I'm going to unpack all of these sleep and

memory secrets. Today we're going to focus on the first of those sleep infused benefits.

Namely, I'm going to tell you about the need for sleep before learning to refresh and restore your brain's

neural ability to make new memories. It all starts while we're awake. Your brain is constantly acquiring and absorbing

novel information intentionally or otherwise, by the way. And different types of memories are imprinted in different parts of your

brain. When it comes to what most of you think of as memory, which is what we call fact-based memory, or you can think of it almost

like textbook like learning, such as memorizing someone's name or remembering where you parked your car last night, sometimes fails me,

that type of memory, that fact-based informational memory critically depends on a long cigar shaped

...