Poor Sleep Prevents Brain From Storing Memories

I think there's an evolutionary advantage to this. If you don't commit new memories when sleep-deprived, then you don't remember how rough the first few months of parenting a newborn can be (you get very little sleep during that time) and you're more likely to have more children.

"The hippocampus stores short-term memories, while the prefrontal cortex is our long-term memory bank." This statement runs contrary to all the current concepts of information storage in the brain. The hippocampus is where long term memories are stored, the prefrontal cortex is involved in working memory, planning and evaluating action outcomes and a bunch of other things we have barely figured out.

Can I remind everyone "Correlation does not imply causation"?

An interesting family that suffers from a specific sleep deprivation disorder where they simply stop sleeping in middle age and die a few months later.<p><a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6503414" rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6503414</a>

Great link. I discovered I am highly allergic to linden trees this summer, my first allergy, and was only sleeping 3-4 hours a night, maximum. I was so confused and forgetful of peoples names.<p>Granted, I also partied non-stop the whole summer.

And yet sleep is always the first thing to be sacrificed when we "need to get stuff done".

Been there, done that. Inadequate deep sleep also causes your body to skip the muscle/tissue repair process that happens overnight. I wound up with tendonitis this way and eventually burnt out.

I think dreaming and the process of storing memories is a key piece of solving Artificial intelligence. IE we must teach the artificial brain to sleep in order for it to store and sort memories. For me it seems similar to a garbage collect function of the brain.<p>"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

Your brain is a neural network of neural networks, during sleep, a cost function is applied across the entire grid. Important aspects of your day are done, and redone at high velocity, simultaneously (leading to dreams).<p>Cost benefit analysis are done against what you might have done, and the results of that, and actions that would have caused more desirable outcomes are projected, as best as it can see, and the habits, and motor neurons are reconfigured accordingly, this explains why when you get good sleep, and you wake up, you find yourself much better able to do tasks than had you not slept. If you don't sleep, you die.<p>Source of these points:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/How-Create-Mind-Thought-Revealed/dp/0670025291" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/How-Create-Mind-Thought-Revealed/dp/06...</a><p><a href="https://www.coursera.org/course/ml" rel="nofollow">https://www.coursera.org/course/ml</a><p>Title is misleading, this function also has to do with encoding short term memories to long term memories. Since the mind only has limited space (limited number of neurons to configure), that only the most useful memories are stored into permanent disk. Disruption of the 7 to 9 hour sleep cycle garbage collects the memories that were about to be stored. The mind queues them up to be dealt with the following day, but sometimes are displaced or missed by more passionate things in the present.<p>Sleep is one of the most important things you can do to maintain your mind and keep it in top running condition for as long as possible, not too little, not too much, sleep in intervals of 90 minutes. If you consume garbage knowledge on a daily basis, your mind will encode that garbage to permanent disk, and you will become that garbage.<p>Conspiracy theorists suffer from a mental misconfiguration where the cost function applied to the neural network of neural networks suffers from "over fitting". Finding patterns in randomness leading to conclusions are not valid. A lambda function can be applied against the cost function which will alleviate this. I can do it in software, and when I discover the operating principles of the neo cortex, I will be able to fix all the conspiracy nuts in the local nut house. Take care to not take for granted the fresh slate of your mind while you are young, because when you are old, it'll be mostly full and encoding new skills to disk much more difficult, the cost function is more reluctant to modify the grids since doing so would damage your ability to consume resources, find mates and create more of you. Fill you mind with timeless wisdom and get good sleep before your hard disks become full.