The Effect of REM Deprivation: Is It Detrimental, Beneficial, or Neutral?

Abstract

Based on the assumption that the mental aspect of REM sleep is an extreme state of divergent thinking, it was hypothesized that the psychological effect of REM deprivation varies on a dimension of creativity versus rote learning. On the creativity pole, REM deprivation has a damaging effect, while on the rote learning pole, it has a beneficial effect. The subjects (.Ss) were 12 male undergraduate students. Each spent 3 nights in the laboratory. Ss served us their own controls, with 5 days separating the REM deprivation and the non‐REM deprivation nights. Before going to bed, each of the Ss was given 4 tasks, on which testing took place the fallowing morning. Comparable tasks, in a balanced design, were used on the REM deprivation and on the non‐REM deprivation nights, The tasks given were: (a) serial memory, (b) “clustering” memory, (c) word fluency, and (d) Guilford's Utility Test. Results showed a significant decrement in creativity (the Guilford's Utility Test), and a significant increment in role memory (the serial memory task), due to REM deprivation. No significant differences were found for the other 2 tasks used, which were somewhere in‐between the two extreme poles of creativity and role learning. These results might explain earlier, contradictory findings in this area. These results lend further support to the general assumption that REM sleep is used by the organism for internal information processing. However, an additional assumption has to be. made, that this processing is divergent and not convergent.

The Effect of Sleep Before or After Learning on Memory

“…Therefore, when prior learning condition is controlled, the second half of the night's sleep after learning appears to be beneficial to long-term recall of material that could be considered more emotive, or having a greater number of associations. This is consistent with the notion that REM sleep benefits the consolidation of emotive material (23), high association value material (24), or material that calls more for divergent processing (37). Alternatively, the different sleep stages may differentially affect the retention of mnemonically learned material but not rotelearned material.…”

Declarative memory consolidation: Mechanisms acting during human sleep

“…The prevailing hypothesis-influenced by psychoanalytic theory-was that new memory content would be reprocessed during dreaming, which was thought to occur during REM sleep (Feldman and Dement 1968;Empson and Clarke 1970;Chernik 1972;Lewin and Glaubman 1975). However, these studies, which all used declarative memory tasks, provided very mixed results and were criticized for methodological reasons, leading some researchers to reject a REM sleep-memory hypothesis completely (Vertes and Eastman 2000;Siegel 2001).…”

Emotional Memory Formation Is Enhanced across Sleep Intervals with High Amounts of Rapid Eye Movement Sleep

“…Specifically, there is an ongoing controversy concerning the differential contribution of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and slow wave sleep (SWS) to memory consolidation. In particular, human studies provided mixed results, some indicating a beneficial effect of REM sleep on memory (Empson and Clarke 1970;Lewin and Glaubman 1975;Tilley and Empson 1978) whereas others suggested SWS to be critical for memory formation (Yaroush et al 1971;Barrett and Ekstrand 1972;Fowler et al 1973;Ekstrand 1977). The divergent outcomes appear to reflect differences in the methods used for investigating memory formation during sleep and in the type of memory examined.…”