Sleep deprivation disrupts memory: here’s why

Acrucial brain signal linked to long-term memory falters in rats when they are deprived of sleep -which might help to explain why poor sleep disrupts memory formation 1 .Even a night of normal slumber after a poor night's sleep isn't enough to fix the signal.These results, published last week in Nature, suggest that there is a "critical window for memory processing", says Loren Frank, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved with the study."Once you've lost it, you've lost it."In time, these findings could lead to targeted treatments to improve memory, says study co-author Kamran Diba, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor. Neurons (artificially coloured) in the hippocampus play a part in learning and memory.Study in rats shows that a key brain signal linked to memory formation deteriorates after broken sleep.