Dr. Matthew Walker

And its basis comes back to something that, in fact, we, I think, hopefully published the first evidence in humans of some years ago now called memory reconsolidation.

So in our episode on learning and memory, we said that there is at least sort of two main steps of memory.

First, you have to imprint and learn the memory, lay down that memory trace.

But then that memory is very fragile and vulnerable to being overwritten by competing information knocked out of place.

And for you to hold on to that memory, you have to go through a second step called memory consolidation, a very slow process.

It's like a very slow pressing of the save button because it's biological.

It requires protein synthesis and all of that good stuff.

But that always struck me as a strange model because it's the equivalent of opening up a Word document.

You type out all of the information into it.

and then you hit the save button.

So I've encoded, imprinted the information that I've hit save and saved it.

And then I close that file.

And then the next day I come back or some days later, and I double click on that file again, because I want to edit it.

I either want to add to it or I want to revise it and change it.

But according to that model, it's been locked in place and you could never edit that Word document.

That seems like a profoundly useless way to store information.

And what we learned is that every time in subsequent days when you reactivate, which is to say when you recollect the memory that has been consolidated, it opens that memory file back up to once again being plastic and malleable.

So you can go in and update the information in that memory store.

And then the next night you consolidate it again.

In other words, you reconsolidate it.