According to the Mirror, researchers at Swansea University have shown that the recall of facts after sleeping can be dependent on how much the person cares about what they are learning.
“Nap studies” performed by a team of psychologists at Swansea University’s Sleep Laboratory, showed that sleep helped English-speaking volunteers remember Welsh words.
Interestingly, they also found that the amount people’s memory improved during sleep depended on how much they valued the Welsh language.
This may not come as a great surprise to anyone who has tried to learn things that they don’t really care about, but the researchers at Swansea think that it might give an important insight into the processes by which the brain stores new information.
Motivation to remember stuff might be related to our tendency to dream about subjects with which we have a strong emotional engagement.
