So, hello there. First of all I might want to tell you that I'm currently on holiday, and a quite long one (3 weeks, wow!) so I'm at my home sweet home now :)
Actually, before this holiday, I've tried to make a list of what I'm going to do on this holiday, although it was just inside my head (which is ineffective, just write it away!), but honestly I can't get all the things done up until now. Just as I remember, one of it was to do a little research on sleep and its effect on memory consolidation. And why am I doing this? Well, actually it all goes back to the fact that I wasn't doing very well at school now, or at least not as well as hoped it would be, and the other fact that I often don't get enough sleep. And then I remembered that I had read about this thing somewhere, sometimes ago, that sleep deprivation does affect your memory, in a way that it would make it worse or make you harder to remember things, and that sleeping does play a significant role in consolidating our memory. Since studying medicine means that I have to remember so many things in so little time, a good memory is almost a must. The sad thing is I don't. Somehow I'm feeling that my brain's capability in remembering things is getting worse and worse every other day, and I'm starting to get suspicious on my lack of sleep being the main cause of what's happening to me.
As I am not very experienced in conducting any kind of research, I kinda don't know what exactly to do. My plan was to create something, maybe a list of things or some kind of new knowledge, for me to memorize during two different condition; the first one is that I get to sleep after memorizing the material, and the second one is that I don't get to sleep DIRECTLY after I memorize the material. So you may say that this experiment is conducted not in the night but rather in the daylight, perhaps in the morning or afternoon. And after that, probably a couple of hours or the next day after I memorize the material, I compare the result, and then I should know whether sleep does affect memory. I know, in may ways, this experiment is very inaccurate, like, I don't have a control variable, the time is too short for this experiment to actually give any expected result (meh, what result am I expecting anyway?)
All in all, I started my experiment by doing some literature research on Google about this topic. And then I stumbled upon some paper that are related to this, but I only read one of it, out of laziness, and you can check it out yourself here (anyway, it's a PDF document). Some part of the paper was too complicated for me to understand, so the point I actually get from reading it is that REM sleep is the type of sleep that have the most significant role in consolidating memory, but the type of memory being consolidated remains unclear. May have missed some important points though, you may need to actually read the paper to get the whole point.
After I read the paper I became very sceptical about continuing on this experiment. So yeah you can guess that I didn't actually do it. Honestly, I do love to sleep. Sleep is good. But sometimes we can get too deeply involved in the things that we are doing, and then we check the time and it turned out to be very very late, and in the morning we already have things to do, and so it causes the lack of sleep. Or rather, a good night sleep. It is indeed another fun fact that a night sleep is so important that a daytime sleep or nap cannot ever replace it, or so I heard. And the irony is, I am doing it this very minute. So I think I better finish off this ramble and go to sleep. For real.
PS. I still have books I planned to finish on reading this holiday, but somehow the ambience in my home makes me feel so lazy to grab and read a book. So let's see, it's only about 10 days left of holiday, will I ever make it till the last chapter?
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