A team of researchers has shed new light on sleep's vital role in boosting our memory. Sleep, they show, helps us to use our memory in the most flexible and adaptable manner possible by strengthening new and old versions of the same memory to similar extents. The University of York researchers also demonstrated that when a memory is retrieved - when we remember something - it is updated with new information present at the time of remembering. The brain appears not to 'overwrite' the old version of the memory, but instead generates and stores multiple (new and old) versions of the same experience.

Representational Picture