The Relationship Between REM Sleep And Memory

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) In a normal brain, the period of deep sleep is the first half of sleep and the period of REM sleep is the second half of sleep. The person would return back to the stages 3 and 2 and afterwards to the REM sleep for staying twenty minutes in a stage four. This is a cyclic process and stages repeat after every ninety minutes but the changes in the stages are going through the
However, a complete understanding of the roles of REM and non-REM sleep in learning and memory has been elusive. 2a) First, piece of evidence is that REM sleep is important to strengthen learning after studying because it reestablishes the neural activity. The second piece of evidence is that anything that exceeds the limits of the brain, brain will not reminisce that. According to Pierre Maquet, there is a reduction in a capacity of REM sleep to learn new schemes. On the other side, NREM sleep does not have the similar consequences.2b) Animals that are kept away from sleeping do not learn. It is because the neural activity that is established when awake seems to be restored when asleep. In addition to that, stress is also an important factor of increase in REM sleep in animals. Therefore, it is substantial that REM sleep recovers the learning processes. 2c) Acetylcholine is the one neurotransmitter that improves learning after REM sleep. On the other side, researchers knows about acetylcholine affects on learning, by experimental data that has shown it has increased cortical plasticity in adult mammals. In addition to that, acetylcholine also regulates the molecular mechanisms of memory steadiness and securement. Scopolamine, which is the antagonist of acetylcholine, was given to rats and shows that it reduces the subsequent performance on
Differences between groups in the amount and quality of REM may predict differences in learning. It is conceivable that the relationship between learning and REM is stronger in the young than in the old. 3a) The first and foremost difference in sleep architecture among young and elderly is that young adults gets lengthier levels of each sleep stage however the elderly does not. In addition to that, the elderly wake up more habitually and unable to enter stage four of sleep. Elderly reaches up to stage three of sleep. Hence, the total time they spent in any phase is going to reduced. The above figure shows that there are more shifts between stages for the elderly in contrast to young adults. 3b) Insomnia, physical illness, medications, nocturia, sleep apnea, increased daytime sleepiness makes older people vulnerable and due to these conditions, they face difficulty for falling in sleep.3c) REM might have a less important role in learning in older brains than in younger brains because brain plasticity goes down over a lifetime. But older people tends to have more neural connections therefore they are not in a need of REM to learn.3d) The correlational method helps to determine the relationship between two variables. In this specific condition, examining the correlation among the amount of time spent in REM and memory performance resulting how much time in sleep spend by