Indianapolis, Oct 09: In a finding that backs up motherly advice to get a good's night sleep, scientists have found that peaceful slumber apparently restores memories that were lost during a hectic day. It's not just a matter of physical recharge. Researchers say sleep can rescue memories in a biological process of storing and consolidating them deep in the brain's complex circuitry.

The finding is one of several conclusions made in a pair of studies that appear in tomorrow's issue of the journal 'Nature' that look at how sleep affects the memory-recording processes, and perhaps safeguards them.

Researchers who conducted the experiments said the results may influence how students learn, and someday could be incorporated into treatments for mental illnesses involving memories, such as post-traumatic stress disorder.
However, other scientists who were not involved in the experiments said additional research is needed into the sleep-memory connection.

In separate studies, scientists at the University of Chicago and the Harvard Medical School trained college-age people to perform specific tasks, then tested them to see how much they recalled after either a night's sleep or several hours awake.
Bureau Report