Sleep Deprivation #7

According to an article published in Nature Neuroscience, studies at the University of California-Berkeley have linked adequate deep sleep to a good memory. Researchers gave 18 college-aged participants and 15 senior participants a series of memory tests, monitored participants' sleep using an electgroencephalogram (EEG) machine, and then tests the participants next morning on the memory tests. Before going to sleep all the participants scored similarly on the test. It was a different story the next morning, however. The older participants were more than 50% less accurate on the memory tests after sleeping. Study co-author Bryce Mander said that analysis showed the differences were not due to changes in memory capacity but to differences in sleep quality. The EEG readings revealed that the seniors got only about 1/4th as much deep sleep as the younger participants. Researchers concluded that the forgetfulness that is often linked with aging may actually be caused by a lack of deep sleep. The differences in memory was attributed to the amount of high-quality deep sleep that the two groups of participants were able to achieve. You might want to pay close attention to this as "sleep" often seems to suffer during holiday seasons . . .