Abstract

‘Dreaming, learning, and memory’ considers the work of Robert Stickgold and the popular theory that brain activation in sleep is necessary for us to reorder the information inside our heads, to get rid of certain obsolete memories, to update memories, and to incorporate new experiences into our memory systems. REM sleep and learning in animals, the explanation of recurrent dreams, and human learning and memory are discussed in turn. It concludes that the brain uses sleep to make bit-by-bit adjustments in its long-term repertoire of learning and memory, in a way that guarantees both efficacy and efficiency. Dreams reveal how procedural and declarative memory systems intersect and interact in sleep.