Nothing beats a good night's sleep, especially to retrieve memory or to boost the ability to learn language, says US research.

The benefits of sleep are well known, but researchers at the University of Chicago have published research in the journal Nature which shows that while we sleep, brain activity encourages higher types of learning.

"Sleep has at least two separate effects on learning," said Daniel Margoliash, of the University of Chicago. "Sleep consolidates memories, protecting them against subsequent interference or decay. Sleep also appears to recover or restore memories," he adds.

Margoliash and colleagues tested the ability of three groups of college students to understand words generated from a difficult-to-comprehend voice synthesizer. They measured their ability to recognise the words and then trained them to do it.

After testing the first group one hour after they had been trained, 54 percent recognised the words, more than double the number before training.

The second group was trained in the morning and tested 12 hours later. Only 10 percent did better than before the training. But students trained in the evening and tested the following morning, after a night's sleep, improved their performance by 19 percent.

When students who had been trained in the morning were tested again after they slept their scores also improved.

"If performance is reduced by interference, sleep might strengthen relevant associations and weaken irrelevant associations, improving access to relevant memories," the researchers say.

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