Memory and Sleep

Professor Karim Nader discusses evidence that deep sleep can benefit learning motor skills such as riding a bike.

There’s been a long debate about what aspect of sleep can affect memory - is it REM sleep, is it non-REM sleep, also what kind of memories can be influenced by sleep? The old thinking used to be that our conscious memories could benefit from REM sleep and there was a sleep state that had very similar physiological properties to the awake state. But currently, I think the majority of the evidence would suggest slow–wave [deep] sleep can be beneficial to skill learning kinds of memories - learning how to ride a bike, or learning how to do a motor task, things that are not necessarily under our conscious control.