Hi there it's Matt here and welcome back to the next installment in

in this series on sleep learning and memory now as you'll remember in the last episode we learned that you need

sleep before learning in order to prepare your brain for the initial act of making new memories, for the initial act of learning

effectively. But what we've also discovered is that you need sleep after learning.

But now to essentially hit the save button on those new memories,

fixating those new memories and cementing them

into the neural architecture of the brain.

In other words, it's sleep after learning that will future-proof new information within your brain and prevent you from forgetting.

And by the way I should note we did not make this discovery, certainly not at my sleep center, far from it.

That discovery happened all the way back in 1924.

When two German researchers, John Jenkins and Carl Dalenbach, they pitted sleep and wake

against each other to see which one would win out in terms of a memory savings benefit.

So it's essentially the researcher's version

of a Coke Pepsi challenge,

but here it was Wake versus Sleep.

And here's what happened.

The participants first learned a list of nonsense words.

So words that would actually be quite difficult to pronounce and as a result

they're actually quite hard to learn and remember. Thereafter the

researchers then tracked how quickly those participants forgot

those memories across an eight-hour time interval. The only difference

however was that that that eight hour interval was spent either awake

...