We know that when we go a night without sleep it is more difficult for us to focus on difficult tasks and we have the feeling that remembering things is more complicated. Experts in the study of sleep have described its different phases, and have described that slow wave sleep is relevant for the consolidation processes of episodic memory. Consolidation is the phenomenon that allows memories to be fixed in long-term memory. It is an important process involved in learning new information. Episodic memory is the type of memory that refers to things like who we ate with on the weekend or where we parked our car the evening before .
With age the slow wave sleep is shorter and also a worse episodic memory. Recent research conducted by the Université Lumière Lyon 2 and published in the Journal of Sleep Research has analyzed whether memory continues to benefit from sleep in older people. The authors asked two groups of people, young and old, to perform a task of locating objects in space, and calculated their rates of information forgetting after twelve hours awake or twelve hours of sleep. They also conducted polysomnography studies to analyze the sleep structure of the participants.
The results of the experiment showed that, in older people, the memory consolidation process did not improve with sleep in the same way that it did in the young group , maintaining a significant forgetfulness rate even after sleep. On the other hand, the quality and structure of sleep were also significantly worse in the elderly, although not specifically in slow wave sleep.
The authors conclude that changes in sleep associated with age could have a negative effect on the memory of the elderly. However, you can always follow certain sleep hygiene guidelines that promote greater rest and you can also perform mental exercises that keep cognitive functions such as memory at a good pace.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
