Rm Sleep And Memory Essay

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the correlational method as a means for examining the relationship between REM sleep and memory. I will describe previous research and then investigate how REM and memory are associated in young people and in older people. In some ways, the sleep patterns of these two groups are very similar, but in some ways they are not. 1a. REM sleep normally happens in an hour after fall asleep and usually lasting about 30 minutes. People fall in the non-REM sleep in three stages which is the most time during the sleep. As the night goes on, the least deep sleep and deepest sleep stages diminish, and the rest of the sleep just shift between REM sleep and NREM-2 sleep. Younger people tend to have longer REM sleep
However, a complete understanding of the roles of REM and non-REM sleep in learning and memory has been elusive. 2a. According to the research done by Pierre Maquet, there are some evidences can show that REM sleep is important in learning and memory. Memory has been reorganized during the REM sleep, so lack of REM sleep will occur effect to the long-term memory traces. Learning ability is damaged by lack of REM sleep but have nothing to do with the NREM sleep. Once the time of REM sleep is back to regular, the ability of learning comes back for both human and animals. 2b. Some of the studies show stress can make the time of REM sleep become longer, but there are evidences proofed that the lack of REM sleep have more effect to learning ability than stress. 2c. Hippocampal cells are important to learning and memory. The duration of hippocampal cells to work is after the REM sleep which is the period of NREM sleep. In order for hippocampal cells to work normally, there is a required for enough REM sleep. According to Pierre Maquet, there are specific macroscopic patterns send by hippocampal cells only being active during the REM
Each participant was measured on: (1) total time spent asleep, (2) duration of REM sleep, and (3) percentage accuracy in learning the list of non-words. 4a. We took the range of time asleep for each group. The range for young people group is 601 minus 342 is equal to 259. The range for older people group is 689 minus 342 is 457. The older people group with higher range have more sleep pattern. Then we calculate the average of total time asleep for each group. Young group is 481.4, and older group is 420 min. The young people group with higher average time of fall asleep slept more. 4b. The duration for REM sleep has stronger relation in young participants than in the older participants. Compare the REM duration and the memory score between young and older participants shows that in young participants the longer the REM duration the higher the memory score, but there are not specific relationship between REM duration and memory for older participants.