MRIs show that people who rest are more in control of their mental health.
According to a new study published in the journal Sleep, a lack of sleep interferes with people’s ability to limit recall of memories that they would rather remain buried and forgotten. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
According to scientists, MRI scans show that people who rest have more control over the areas of the brain that control memories. And it’s important for understanding mental health issues, because those who suffer from anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress also have trouble sleeping.
For the study, researchers used MRI scans to observe the brain activity of 85 healthy adults. Half of the participants slept well in the sleep lab, while the other half stayed up all night.
The research team then tested the participants’ ability to suppress memories, particularly unpleasant ones.
Suppression, they say, is a very clever function of the brain because it weakens all the connective traces of memory, thus preventing us from connecting the dots to recall the full picture of an experience when triggered by an external stimulus.
Study participants were asked to view previously seen faces paired with images from different scenes. Some of these scenes were unpleasant, such as a scene of a car accident or a fight.
For each face, they were asked to remember or forget the scene associated with it.
Resting participants who were asked to suppress this image had more activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—the area of the brain that controls thoughts, actions, and emotions—than those who were awake all night, the researchers reported.
According to the results, activity in the hippocampus, which is involved in memory recall, also decreased when people who slept well were asked to suppress the memory.
These results of MRI examinations show that good sleep can give people better control over the brain processes that control memory recallallows you to suppress unpleasant thoughts.
Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is also associated with better memory control, the researchers added. THE REM sleep known to be associated with both dreams and memory consolidation.