Andrew Huberman· PhD
the first is what we call memory translocation sleep and particularly what we found for fact-based memories and I should note by the way that this story of sleep after learning is a two-part or it runs in two different narratives one is sleep after learning for fact-based memory what we describe as declarative memory and you've uh done a fantastic uh previous episode on working memory and describe all of these different types of memory so one story line has been sleep after learning for fact-based memory but the other which is equally interesting is sleep for non declarative or procedural skill memory in other words what we think of as motor memory but I'll come back to motor memory in a second what we then found for this sleep and textbook like memory is that there are two mechanisms the first translocation and here what we found is that it's deep nonrem sleep for fact-based memories and it's those big slow powerful brain waves that we spoke about in the first episode combined with those sleep spindles that ride on top of them almost like a surfer on a huge amplitude wave and it's the combination of those two brain waves that acts like a file transfer mechanism and it moves and shifts memories from a short-term vulnerable Reservoir the hippocampus to the more permanent long-term storage site the cortex in the brain and therefore protect protecting them and making them safe