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•  Many students try to study the whole night and not sleep before an exam.
•  Two separate studies show this may do more harm than good.
•  The studies found that a good night's sleep may improve memory.
•  The findings of both studies appeared in the publication Nature.
•  Scientists at the University of Chicago did one of them.
•  They trained students to listen to unclear speech produced by a machine.
•  Some students listened to the recording after a night of sleep.
•  Others were tested twelve hours after the training, with no sleep.
•  Guess what? The students who slept understood the recording better.
•  Professor Daniel Margoliash says sleep has at least two effects on learning.
•  One is to strengthen memories and protect them against interference.
•  The second is to recover memories that have been lost.
•  The other study took place at Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts.
•  Scientists trained one-hundred people to repeat two series of finger movements.
•  The act was similar to playing notes on a piano.
•  People who slept between learning the first series and the second did the best.
•  The study suggested that memories are recorded in three steps.
•  Scientists say the process is similar to the way a computer stores information.
•  In humans, they say, the second step requires sleep.