Learning during Sleep

Neurobiologists at Freie Universität Berlin Demonstrate Significance of Sleep for Learning Processes in Bees. Biologists at Freie Universität Berlin in the group of the highly regarded bee researcher Randolf Menzel have demonstrated for the first time the importance of deep sleep for learning processes in the brains of insects. The experiments by the Berlin scientists suggest that the link between sleep and memory formation is evolutionarily far older than previously thought. For mammals this relationship has been known for some time. "We were able to prove that sleep is critical to memory consolidation even in insects," says Ruth Bartels who, along with her colleague Hanna Zwaka, published the research findings in a recent issue of the prestigious scientific journal Current Biology . Honeybees sleep several times during the day and at night. Up to now scientists were unsure of the reasons.