Recently, I read an article on false memories, and immediately thought about this class. In the class module, we learned that simply telling a person that a memory happened and providing details of the memory could implant false memories. For example, in the module, Chris never got lost in the mall at age 5. Therefore, he had no recollection of this memory. However, after his brother Jim told him that it did happen, providing some details of the incident, Chris was able to create a false memory of him being lost in the mall. This article that I read, however, did not dwell on how others can impact our false memories, but how our own body can cause us to have false memories.

As college students, I am sure that we can all attest to pulling an all-nighter before a huge exam. However, The Effects of Sleep Restriction and Sleep Deprivation in Producing False Memories, by Chatburn, highlights the importance of sleep on the ability to have effective memories. Sleep plays a pivotal role in learning, higher cognitive functioning, and memory (Chatburn, 2017). In regards to memory, sufficient amount of sleep, allows us to properly encode and consolidate our memoires. When we are asleep, information that we learned while awake, are constantly rehearsed. False memories occur because of error in the recollection of tracing our memories, as a result of improper encoding (Chatburn, 2017). Therefore, sleep loss impacts not only the quality but, also the quantity of our ability to encode material (Chatburn, 2017). Chatburn supported the effects of sleep deprivation using a randomized trial. In one trial, the results suggested that participants that were sleep deprived, performed significantly lower on the verbal false memory task, when compared to participants that were deemed well rested. This task should be familiar to us because we also completed it during Cog-Lab 3. We were presented with a list of words, and then had to recall as many words as we can remember. The participants in his trial that were sleep deprived, recalled more words that were not presented (false words), than those who were not deprived. Similar to the participants completing the trial, when taking an exam after pulling an all-nighter, we are more inclined to create false memories of the material that we studied. Because sleep is loss, our brains are unable to make the full connections between what we studied, increasing the likelihood of a falsified memory.

I thought that this was a good article to introduce because I feel like as college students, we undermine the importance of sleep. Also, I thought it was helpful to learn more about the biology that influences false memories.

Sources

Chatburn, Alex, et al. “The Effects of Sleep Restriction and Sleep Deprivation in Producing False Memories.” Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, vol. 137, 2017, pp. 107–113., doi:10.1016/j.nlm.2016.11.017.