Database And Brain

I found many people are looking for an easy way to memorize something.

I am a guy who needs a nap to memorize well. This has been said that it is just an excuse of my nap in a class.

Here's a logical explanation why a sleep lets you memorize well. It is again from the talk.

It is popular to make a test about memory to see how an animal reacts when a blow gets in your eyes. When you do, you close your eyes, don't you.

After making an animal listen to a sound, the animal gets a blow in its eyes. Sound, Blow, Sound, Blow, repeatedly. Then, when the animal listens to the sound, the animal will close its eyes. It is the Pavlov's conditional reflex.

It is memory that makes the animal understood, "a blow is coming soon after the sound". There is nothing to do with hippocampus at this stage.

Then, we put an additional step. We shed light on the animal at the same time when making the sound. Later, we do the previous test, Sound-Blow.

And then, against the light, an animal closes its eyes, and waits for a blow. For this memory, hippocampus is necessary.

Both look the same. But there's a big difference. It is that Light is apart from Sound and Blow in terms of time. Putting things, which are apart in terms of time, together is very difficult.

This is syllogism. Light and Sound. Sound and Blow. Then, Light and Blow. This kind of syllogism can't be done without hippocampas.

Let's look back the mouse test(please refer to "Sleep to Memorize").

The locations, A, B, C, and D, are distant from each other. But in a REM sleep, ABCD is compressed alltogether. Then, some information, which is apart from each other in terms of time, can mean the others in a series.

So this kind of "sensing" happens when sleeping.

He says well-reorganized-information-in-sleep is limited. So try hard before you sleep!

This is translated from this page, titled "Things you didn't understand may get clear when sleeping".

「海馬(hippocampus)」 is the book by the researcher, Yuji Ikegaya.