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Nicolette Ognjanovski of the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Development Biology at Michigan and colleagues discovered that sleep deprivation interfere with the rhythm of neuronal firing in hippocampus part of the brain that is responsible for formation of long-term memories.
National Sleep Foundation recommend 7 to 9 hours of sleep per night for sound health. Sleep deprivation prevents memory formation because it prevents brain from converting short-term memory to long-term memory.
The researchers examined the hippocampal of mice and discovered that those that had sufficient sleep displayed better sleep-related oscillations than sleep-deprived mice.
This discovery shows that memories are not stored in one cell, but distributed through the network. The dominant oscillatory activities for learning is being controlled by cells in hippocampus.