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It was not until 1924 when two German researchers, John Jenkins and Karl Dallenbach, pitted sleep and wake against each other to see which one won out for a memory-savings benefit—a memory researchers’ version of the classic Coke vs. Pepsi challenge. Their study participants first learned a list of verbal facts. Thereafter, the researchers tracked how quickly the participants forgot those memories over an eight-hour time interval, either spent awake or across a night of sleep. Time spent asleep helped cement the newly learned chunks of information, preventing them from fading away. In contrast, an equivalent time spent awake was deeply hazardous to recently acquired memories, resulting in an accelerated trajectory of forgetting.
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