Sleep Deprivation and false memories are very common, but not much study has gone into sleep deprivation in the formation of false memories. When under certain conditions, sleep deprivation can lead to an increased risk to false memories. Sleep deprivation increased false memories in a misinformation task when participants were sleep deprived during event encoding, but didn’t have a significant effect when the deprivation occurred after event encoding. The brain does something called encoding. Encoding is the first step taken to create a new memory. Encoding allows the item of interest to be converted into a contrast so that it can be stored in your memory. Encoding happens through the thalamus and the frontal lobe of your brain. The memories …show more content…
The mean age of the group was 19.2 and 54% were female while other 46% were male. They were all native English speakers who weren’t taking any medications to affect their sleep. For each participant, there was a calculated memory score, MCR, and false memory rate. MCR was higher after sleep deprivation than after sleep. There were no differences that showed up in the evening encoding condition. Both experiment 1 and 2 were both good. In experiment 1 the evidence showed that restricted sleep increases false memory. Participants that got 5 or fewer hours of sleep the night before the experiment were more likely to say they saw something they didn’t. In experiment 2, the group that was sleep deprived showed that false memories were more likely to happen. The results of both experiments also show that sleep deprivation may not be needed to increase false memories, although restricted sleep can. All in all, sleep deprivation does in fact increase the risk for false memories. Sleep deprivation and false memories do go hand in hand. If you were to get the average amount of sleep, your brain could encode better. The risk of false memories may not be as high when you get the correct amount of sleep for