Meryl Horne

And you just called them up out of the blue?

Yeah, the people who had read that type of story still remembered it better than the people who didn't sleep during that original study four years ago.

Whoa, whoa.

Oh, that is crazy.

And since then, we've had other studies finding that like, yes, sleep does enhance all different types of memory, not just reading this like kind of emotionally traumatic stuff, but it can even help with like motor memories.

So like learning how to do a new skill with your body.

And it's not a small effect either.

Like you'd probably notice it.

Roughly how many studies have now found that if you sleep right after learning something, your memory for it is better.

Are there like a dozen, more than a dozen?

We really know this by now.

And on the flip side, we do think that getting crappy sleep is a risk factor for dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

Well, one reason has to do with like how our brains make memories in the first place.

Uh-huh.

So like, let me just like nerd out to you a little bit about that for a second.

It's really cool.

So, after we have an experience, we think that our brains will, like, replay little bits of it after it happens.

I talked about this with Professor Loren Frank.

He studies memory at the University of California, San Francisco.

So, like...