--- title: How Sleep Makes Long Term Memories description: That’s the technique that worked best for mice in an intriguing study on how sleep helps the brain to create and store memories canonical: https://time.com/2827744/sleep-helps-you-remember-things-if-youre-a-mouse/ author: Alice Park article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-06-05T19:38:11.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-21T08:14:51.130Z article:section: Health og:title: How Sleep Makes Long Term Memories og:description: That’s the technique that worked best for mice in an intriguing study on how sleep helps the brain to create and store memories og:url: https://time.com/2827744/sleep-helps-you-remember-things-if-youre-a-mouse/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How Sleep Makes Long Term Memories twitter:description: That’s the technique that worked best for mice in an intriguing study on how sleep helps the brain to create and store memories twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # Sleep Helps You Remember Things If You're a Mouse > Sponsored content. 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Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators.  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Jun 5, 2014 7:38 PM UTC  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Jun 5, 2014 7:38 PM UTC It’s hard to tell how much a mouse remembers, but by peering at the activity of nerve cells in animals’ brains while they sleep, researchers have found some clues. That’s how Wen-Biao Gan, a neuroscientist and physiologist at New York University, learned some interesting things about what happens when mice snooze. By tagging nerves cells in their brains, Gan and his colleagues report in the journal _Science_ that sleep is actually a very active time for the brain, in which connections between buzzing nerve cells are made in order to consolidate memories. The researchers had mice run on a rotating and accelerating rod, then allowed them to sleep. Some of the mice got to slumber undisturbed, while others were handled to keep them from getting quality sleep. The animals who slept undisturbed showed signs of new neural connections forming during just the first phases of sleep, known as non REM sleep. “My feeling is that sleep is important to the process of forming long term memory,” says Gan. During REM, not only are the same nerve connections that the mice made while they ran reactivated, but new connections were also made. When he blocked the reactivation of nerves, no new connections were made, suggesting that learning, or making long term memories, is a two part process in which sleep plays an important role. How applicable are these findings to helping people? Hopefully some of same principles apply, says Gan, although more studies will be needed to confirm that. So don’t underestimate how much work your brain is doing while you catch some z’s. 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