Meryl Horne

It was done by Jan Born at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

So here's what they did.

Okay.

They got around 30 people into a lab at night and had them read something.

Kind of a bedtime story?

Oh, Jesus.

It sounds like it would be pretty intense.

And, you know, part of the reason they chose this was because they wanted people to really be paying attention to the thing they were reading, and they figured, like, all this should do that.

Okay.

But so then they moved on to the sleep part of the study.

So after reading this story, they either had people sleep for a few hours or they had them stay awake.

Okay.

And then they tested them to see how good their memories were for the thing that they just read.

And the sleep made a difference.

But what really caught my eye about this study was what happened next.

So the researchers then waited four years and then called up some of the same people to ask them what they could remember.

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.