Sleep is known to contribute to the healthy functioning of the brain and the consolidation of memories. Past psychology research specifically highlighted its role in retaining episodic memories, which are memories of specific events or experiences.

Researchers at Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Academy for Research and Education, University of Toronto and other institutes recently carried out a study to better understand the extent to which sleep transforms how we remember real-world experiences over time and what processes could underpin this transformation. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, suggest that sleep actively and selectively improves the accuracy with which we remember one-time real-world experiences.

“My lab studies real-life memory such as the memory of events that occur as part of daily experiences,” Brian Levine, senior author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “We are interested in how these memories are transformed over time and why some elements are remembered while others are forgotten. This is hard to do with naturalistic events in peoples’ lives where we have no control over what happened. So we set up the Baycrest Tour as a controlled but naturalistic event that we could use to test memory.”