Effects of Sleep

Why Don’t You Sleep on It?

Conventional wisdom suggests that new insights about different facets of a problem and alternative solutions to resolve it can be gained during a good night’s sleep. There is a connection between these insights, the brain and sleeping. From a neuroscience perspective a regular, adequate amount of sleep is essential for brain development and synaptic consolidation, which helps to reconfigure weak and unstable memory traces into permanent ones in the long-term memory. Sleep deprivation, on the other hand, interferes with the efficient firing of the neurons and compromises the ability to focus and pay attention, and to learn and memorize new things (Arden, 2010).