Neuroscientist Jan Born is quietly jealous of his eight-month-old daughter. "She sleeps when she wants," he says. Then again, he says, sleep is a crucial time for learning, and she probably has more to learn about the world than the average adult. "I think about whether she needs this sleep because her hippocampus is full," he says.The hippocampus is a node in the brain's memory network, the place memories are first encoded for transferral later to longer-term storage. Sleep is one way its contents are downloaded to other regions of the brain where it is thought they are interpreted and stored. "We know that during sleep the brain processes a wide range of memory types," says Robert Stick-gold, a neuroscientist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston, Massachusetts.
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