How does sleep help my memory?

Here's how sleep helps boost memory:

• The more hours we spend awake, the more sluggish our minds become: pulling an all-nighter decreases the ability to cram in new facts by nearly 40 percent, due to a shutdown of certain brain regions during sleep deprivation.

• Sleep is needed to clear the brain’s short-term memory storage and make room for new information.

• Fact-based memories are temporarily stored in the brain’s hippocampus region before being sent to the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which may have more storage space. So if your “inbox” in your hippocampus is full, until you sleep to move those facts onward, you cannot take any more facts in!