Overnight Alchemy: Sleep-dependent Memory Evolution

By Matthew P. Walker, Robert Stickgold. 2010

235 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Diekelmann and Born offer an elegant and convincing overview of evidence supporting sleep’s role in the consolidation of newly acquired memories1. Increasing awareness of memory stages that move beyond classical consolidation (e.g.2), a process concerned with the veridical preservation of stored information, highlights the internal contradictions of a system which, on the one hand, may seek to preserve memories in their original form, while on the other, allows them to evolve into more generalized representations of the world in which we live. While there is considerable evidence that slow-wave sleep (SWS) facilitates the consolidation and thus preservation of newly formed episodic memories3, emerging evidence suggests that sleep, and in some cases, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, can play an important role in the extraction of generalized informational schemas from individual experiences4–6. This is an alternative view to that proposed by Diekelmann and Born 1, which examines systems- followed by synaptic-consolidation across the night. Here, we focus on the integrative stage of memory processing3, 7, beyond consolidation. Without implying that any of these stages is uniquely linked to a specific brain state, we review evidence for the proposal that sleep, and REM sleep in particular, supports three specific, but not mutually exclusive, forms of memory integration: 1) the unitization of recently acquired related items, 2) the assimilation of recently encoded items into networks of more remote items, and 3) the abstraction of generalizable rules from existing information stores, a process that leads to the construction of novel, higher-level schemas (Fig 1). Figure 1 Evolutionary stages of episodic memory processing

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Replay in Deep Learning: Current Approaches and Missing Biological Elements (2021, positive): “REM sleep has been shown to play at least three intertwined roles (Walker & Stickgold, 2010): (1) it unitizes distinct memories for easier storage (Haskins et al., 2008; Bader et al., 2010; Tibon et al., 2014; Kuriyama, Stickgold, & Walker, 2004; Ellenbogen, Hu, Payne, Titone, & Walker, 2007), (2)…”
The restless engram: consolidations never end. (2012, background): “It is now well established, however, that consolidation of explicit memory benefits from sleep as well (Diekelmann and Born, 2010; Walker and Stickgold, 2010).”
The molecular and systems biology of memory. (2014, unknown): “It is now well established, however, that consolidation of explicit memory benefits from sleep as well (Diekelmann and Born, 2010; Walker and Stickgold, 2010).”
How Memory Replay in Sleep Boosts Creative Problem-Solving (2018, background): “These two stages are very different and very likely have complementary functions [15,16].”
What Learning Systems do Intelligent Agents Need? Complementary Learning Systems Theory Updated. (2016, unknown): “…between encoding-based and retrieval-based models is not absolute: as alluded to above, generalized replay may facilitate the formation of new representations that directly capture distant relationships between items (e.g., the linear hierarchy in the transitive inference paradigm [5,90,110]).”