Hi there's

it's Matt here and welcome back to the final installment in this series on sleep

learning and memory and don't worry by the way there's going to be so much more to say on

this topic including the idea of selectively hacking which memories you decide to line up for sleep enhancement and also the role of

sleep in actively forgetting rather than remembering information.

But exactly how does deep sleep save memories within the brain?

What is going on inside of your brain during deep non-rem sleep that is so special

That it allows you to fixate new memories and stop your brain from forgetting.

Well, we've discovered that there are at least two

non-mutually exclusive mechanisms that will causally explain how your sleeping brain retains and remembers

new information. These are the following. The first is a process of shifting information from short to long term memory storage sites.

The second is something that we call Memory replay and it's something that may have also

been an inspiration for the movie Inception and we'll get to that, don't worry.

By the way, I should note there is a third possible mechanism

that concerns the rebalancing of the strength of the connections

within the brain or what we call the rebalancing of sign. of the

strength of the connections within the brain or what we call the rebalancing of synaptic homeostasis.

But we're going to come on to that in a later episode

when we speak about how sleep can also unwire the brain rather than rewire the brain

and specifically when it comes to sleep and forgetting. And yes I did say that that one of the benefits of sleep is also to help us forget as well as help us to remember.

I will unpack that paradox in a later episode but today we're going to focus on how the

sleeping brain helps you remember and we're going to focus on those two mechanisms that I described.

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