Kolt Pruitt

“Which sleep period would confer a greater memory savings benefit—that filled with deep NREM, or that packed with abundant REM sleep? For fact-based, textbook-like memory, the result was clear. It was early-night sleep, rich in deep NREM, that won out in terms of providing superior memory retention savings relative to late-night, REM-rich sleep.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Our own studies support his wisdom: daytime naps that contain sufficient numbers of sleep spindles also offer significant motor skill memory improvement, together with a restoring benefit on perceived energy and reduced muscle fatigue.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Before having slept, participants were fetching memories from the short-term storage site of the hippocampus—that temporary warehouse, which is a vulnerable place to live for any long duration of time if you are a new memory. But things looked very different by the next morning. The memories had moved. After the full night of sleep, participants were now retrieving that same information from the neocortex, which sits at the top of the brain—a region that serves as the long-term storage site for fact-based memories, where they can now live safely, perhaps in perpetuity.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“In doing so, sleep had delightfully cleared out the hippocampus, replenishing this short-term information repository with plentiful free space.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams