It’s surprising news bound to bring joy to students studying for exams everywhere. The best way to memorise newly-acquired knowledge is to go to sleep, scientists believe. Researchers in Germany found that the brain is better during sleep than during wakefulness at resisting attempts to scramble or corrupt a recent memory. Their study, published in Nature Neuroscience, provides new insights into the hugely complex process by which we store and retrieve deliberately acquired information -- learning, in short.

科学家的这项最新的研究估计能让广大莘莘学子 “雀跃万分”了，因为研究发现：睡眠使得人们吸收新知识、记住新信息的能力大大提高，也就是说，睡觉是最好的吸收新知识的方式。想学习？想变的更加聪明？睡觉去吧！据悉，来自德国的研究员发现人处于睡眠状态时，大脑更能“记住和吸收”刚学到的知识，恰恰相反，如果人在清醒状态的时候，人的大脑会对刚学到的知识、刚接收到的信息产生“本能的抵制”，比起睡觉的时候，处理新信息的能力要差得好多。这项最新的调查结果发表在《自然神经科学》杂志上，这项杂志主要分析了人的神经系统对于在学习的认知能力上起到什么作用。

Fresh memories, stored temporarily in a region of the brain called the hippocampus, do not gel immediately, earlier research showed. It was also known that reactivation of those memories soon after learning plays a crucial role in their transfer to more permanent storage in the brain’s ’hard drive’, the neocortex. During wakefulness, however, this period of reactivation renders the memories more fragile. Learning a second poem at this juncture, for example, will likely make it harder to commit the first one to deep memory.

为什么睡觉反而是吸收新知识的最好方式呢？科学家是这样解答的。这是要源于大脑中的“海马体”的“吸收习惯”的原因，据悉，大脑内的海马体主要负责学习和记忆，日常生活中的记忆，特别是“短期记忆”都储存在海马体中，如果一个记忆片段，比如一个电话号码或者一个人在短时间内被重复提及的话通过海马体，就会被它转存入‘大脑硬盘’大脑皮层，成为永久记忆。而海马体在处理短期记忆时，不能做到“及时”处理，特别在大脑清醒状态时，海马体对于激活短期记忆会有“迟钝”的本能反应，在清醒状态中，对于暂时学到的新信息海马体不能马上立刻“吸收”。

Lead author Dr. Susanne Diekelmann said: ’Reactivation of memories had completely different effects on the state of wakefulness and sleep. ’Based on brain imaging data, we suggest the reason for this unexpected result is that already during the first few minutes of sleep, the transfer from hippocampus to neocortex has been initiated.’ After only 40 minutes of sleep, significant chunks of memory were already ’downloaded’ and stored where they ’could no longer be disrupted by new information that is encoded in the hippocampus’, she explained.

医生Susanne Diekelmann说：“大脑分别在清醒状态和混沌状态时，处理暂时记忆的效果是大大不同的。基于我们最新对大脑的分析，当人在处于轻度睡眠状态时，也就是刚进入睡眠的前2分钟，大脑内的海马体向大脑‘硬盘’大脑皮层的转化活动就会被激活，经过40分钟的睡眠，新吸收的知识就会完全‘下载’到大脑硬盘中，成为永久记忆。也就是说，睡眠反而是吸收最新知识的最佳方式！”