How sleep affects our memory

The "sleepless nights" during the application phase have paid off: Prof. Dr. Jan Born, head of the Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology, and his team can look forward to a million-euro grant to create the research group "Abstraction of Information in Sleep" from the German Research Foundation. The focus of their research: to explore the cognitive function of sleep, i.e. memory formation, and ultimately to deduce how we can improve our sleep and its functions. 

Sleep is known to have many positive effects on our body, such as on our metabolism, physical as well as mental health. Although we are not actively aware of the sleep phase, sleep is anything but an idle state. Rather, we continue to process information that we have absorbed during the waking phase. We take in much more information than we can even process, let alone store. In the current digital age, this flood of information has increased dramatically once again. Prof. Born and his research group assume that the "offline" mode of sleep serves to reduce this information load through abstraction to certain core content. The main goals of the planned research group are to characterize which information is stored in long-term memory and how it is abstracted during sleep. 

The resulting understanding of the memory function of sleep should ultimately pave the way for improving memory processes in the context of diseases such as Alzheimer's or in the assimilation of knowledge through appropriate sleep-related interventions. 

The research group around spokesperson Prof. Born will be located at the Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology with close links to the Werner Reichardt Center for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN), the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research (HIH) and to Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

The Faculty of Medicine congratulates Prof. Born and his team on the funding!