After a long afternoon or night of studying organic chemistry do you sometimes wake up the next day with little or no recall of what reagent does what? If that happens a lot, it may be that your sleep pattern is to blame.
Scientists have learned that several types of memory require sleep for consolidation. That is, to move a memory from the short-term neural pathways that are getting rewritten every few seconds to the long-term networks that last for days and weeks one needs adequate sleep (and several types of sleep). 5 or 6 hours just doesn’t cut it. Even 7 hours night after night can get in the way of learning.
To learn more about how sleep controls your ability to remember and perform at your best, listen to this Science Friday episode: Science of Sleep: How Sleep Affects Your Memory (Feb 8, 2013).
And the next time you look at your parents (or they look at you) and think, “how could you forget?”, it might just be insufficient sleep that is to blame.