Sleep Crucial for Learning New Motor Skills

Getting a good night’s sleep soon after learning new motor skills is essential to retaining them, scientists say. While they have long known the importance of adequate sleep in regard to memorizing facts and other data, the questions remained about how sleep affected motor skills, which involve a different part of the brain. New studies in Germany and in the United States have concluded that while sleep is important for proper storing of these memories in the brain, it must occur “within a critical time frame,” according to the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. People who were taught a skill in the evening and were retested after a full night’s sleep did much better than those who received the training in the morning and were tested 12 hours later, before going to sleep.