www.lesswrong.com/posts/cfRHPHdgpNcSEcY5y/curing-sleep-my-experiences-doing-cowb...
1 correction found
We didn't know about sleep-as-memory-post-processing
This overstates how little was known in 2012. Long before 2012, major reviews and experiments already described sleep as supporting memory consolidation and offline memory processing.
Full reasoning
This claim is too strong as a description of the state of knowledge in 2012.
By then, sleep's role in learning and memory was already a well-established research topic. A 2001 Science review states that "Sleep has been implicated in the plastic cerebral changes that underlie learning and memory" and that evidence for sleep's participation in consolidation came from "a wide range of experimental observations."
By 2010, a Nature Reviews Neuroscience review was even more explicit: "Sleep has been identified as a state that optimizes the consolidation of newly acquired information in memory" and its key points summarize extensive evidence that sleep promotes consolidation of declarative, procedural, and emotional memories.
Researchers still debated details and mechanisms, but it is not accurate to say that "we didn't know about" sleep as a form of offline memory processing. That idea was already prominent in the literature well before 2012.
2 sources
- The role of sleep in learning and memory - PubMed
Sleep has been implicated in the plastic cerebral changes that underlie learning and memory. Indications that sleep participates in the consolidation of fresh memory traces come from a wide range of experimental observations.
- The memory function of sleep | Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Sleep has been identified as a state that optimizes the consolidation of newly acquired information in memory... Key Points: Sleep promotes the consolidation of declarative as well as procedural and emotional memories in a wide variety of tasks.