Coffee Reboots Memory.

Sun, 16 Nov 2008

Sleep loss produces false memory but caffeine can help straighten them out
by Ernest Gill

IF you don’t get enough sleep at night, be sure to drink a strong cup of coffee before trying to remember important facts – otherwise your sleep-deprived mind will play tricks with your memory, according to a team of German researchers.

Lack of sleep impairs the mind’s ability to recall facts efficiently. Still in a dream-like state, the mind jumbles memory so that you may claim with high confidence to remember things that in fact never happened, typically due to strong semantic associations with actually encoded events, say the researchers at Luebeck University, Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf and the universities of Geneva and Zurich.

In other words, sleep deprivation means the mind has not finished sorting and storing memories. It is a bit like when your computer warns you that some unsaved files may be lost if you reboot your computer without waiting for it to save everything first.

But a good jolt of caffeine is often sufficient to speed up the "saving files" process so that memories are all sorted and clear, the researchers write in the journal Popular Library of Science One (PLOS One).

Sleep is known to provide optimal neurobiological conditions for consolidation of memories for long-term storage, whereas sleep deprivation acutely impairs retrieval of stored memories. – dpa
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Updated: 11:56AM Mon, 10 Nov 2008