Ambien Can Improve Your Recall, But Only For Unhappy Memories
Sweet Dreams? Wikimedia Commons A new study finds that the sleeping pill enhances your ability to consolidate negative emotional memories as you snooze. If you're having a rough day, popping a sleeping pill and hitting the sack could be the worst thing you could do--it could help you recall bad memories even better than usual. Ambien has been shown to boost your brain's ability to store and consolidate memories. But it appears to work explicitly for negative emotional memories, according to new research from psychologists at the University of California. During stage 2 sleep, sleep spindles--little flashes of brain activity--help the brain process short-term memories into long-term memories. A previous study by psychologist Sara Mednick of UC Riverside found that sleep spindles play a role in processing explicit memory, or specific facts, and a greater density of sleep spindles can enhance verbal memory. In a new study published in Journal of...