We all know how terrible we feel after a restless night. Now research conducted by a neuroscientist from Michigan has provided concrete evidence that a lack of sleep affects the average persons memory quite adversely and can increase the episodes of false memory that an individual experiences.

The findings of course are of interest to everyone from forgetful seniors whose memory lapses lead to failing to take essential medications to students who are cramming desperately to pass some exam or another.

Kimberley Fenn, who was the principal investigator and is an MSU assistant professor of psychology, and her team, studied the occurrence of false memory in a group of student volunteers. Although previous studies have proved that sleep does indeed improve memory Fenn says that hers was the first to actually address the issue of the effects of sleep deprivation on memory errors.

Each of the students participating in the research were exposed to a set of words and then asked twelve hours later to look at individual words and decide if they were a part of the set that they had been shown earlier. One half of the group was given the list at 10am and then retested, without having slept, at 10pm. The other group were shown their original word list at night and then tested twelve hours later each having got 6-7 hours sleep.

Three different sessions were conducted but in each one the students who had experienced a sleeping period between initial exposure and retesting performed better than their counterparts and chose fewer incorrect words.

Fenn admits that scientists can still not be sure why this is. She believes that perhaps sleep strengthens the source of the memory, although she admits it may just be that the daytime group was bombarded with so much other information over the course of the day that their memory abilities were adversely affected.

Fenn and her colleagues plan to expand their research, focusing next on a group of older participants. Since researchers already now know that older people tend to experience more memory problems than young people, and more instances of “false memory” Fenn hopes that in some way her work can help improve their overall quality of life.