Losing sleep leaves you vulnerable to 'false memories'
Jul-31-2014

Sleep deprivation isn't good for any part of your body, but a new study says it can take a really devastating toll on your memory - finding loss of sleep can leave people with false or inaccurate memories.

To get the results researchers at Michigan State University and the University of California, Irvine attempted to suggest fake memories to sleep deprived subjects, in order to see how accurate their recollection was.

Study lead Stephen Frenda says he wanted to look specifically at how sleep loss affects people's recollection of detailed events.

"The studies that do exist look mostly at sleep deprived people's ability to accurately remember lists of words-not real people, places and events," he told the Association of Psychological Science

The experiment's 104 participants were asked to look at photos of a crime - half saw them on the night before the experiment, half on the next morning. Half of each group got a good night's sleep, while the other half was kept wide awake; then, each subject read a story about the pictures laced with misinformation, and was quizzed on what they remembered from the photos.

Researchers found the participants who were sleep deprived throughout the whole experiment - seeing the photos and hearing the false narrative - were the most likely to misremember details or recall false information.

The study concludes lack of sleep prevented some participants from properly committing the photos to memory. "Sleep deprivation may have impaired encoding of the original event, thus making memory more vulnerable to intrusions from misleading post event information."

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