Studies suggest that getting extra sleep aids in learning physical skills, building muscle memory, and motor skills.

The past decade’s sleep and dream related research is leading to new discoveries that continue to add to the known benefits to getting that extra hour or two of daily sleep each night.

“I value sleep a lot, but I usually can’t seem to get as much as I want,” Noel Brindise, sophomore, said.

Brindise will sometimes pull out her homework wherever she is, at school, on the bus to get it done as fast as possible and be able to go to sleep.

“Sleep is like the goal of my entire day sometimes,“ Brindise said. “I usually get about 7.5 hours of sleep.”

Brindise is a cello player and could benefit greatly from getting eight hours of sleep each night.

TED-Medical, or TEDMED is a branch of the global Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conferences. TEDMED recently sponsored a Google Hangout live event with a small group of “sleep experts.” TEDMED’s mission is to promote and enable the spread of ideas which may in the future contribute to the medical-treatment knowledge-base.

“You can change your performance overnight by getting a good night’s sleep,” James Maas, co-author of the book “Sleep to Win” said in the (TEDMED) Google Hangout.

In addition to the obvious physical benefits and the ‘memory consolidation’ that occurs during sleep, where memories from the day before are sorted and organized, getting a little extra sleep after a day of practice (an instrument, a sport, a dance, etc.) will improve motor skills dramatically.

“Somewhere around six and a half to seven hours into the night, something happens in the brain. We have a cascade of calcium into the motor cortex that forms motor-muscle memory,” Maas said.

The implication of this process, which can’t be emulated with drugs or supplements, is that substantial gains can be made in motor skills overnight.

“If you practice something and then, that very night, get eight hours of sleep you show a minimum of 27 percent improvement in that skill the next day,” Maas said.

Extra sleep is also believed to add solidity to memories made during the day.

“We know that sleep seems to play a very important role. It makes memories a more permanent, less fragile part of the brain,” said Sarah E. Allen, PhD, researcher at Southern Methodist University.

There are two phases of memory consolidation. The period four to six hours after a practice session is referred to as “stabilization,” according to Allen.

This makes getting at least eight hours of sleep every night very much worth the lost time, for anyone who is involved in activities which require good motor skills and quick motor skill learning.

“If you look at modern society, there has in recent years been a considerable erosion of sleep time,” Matthew Walker, PhD, director of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s [BIDMC] Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory said, describing this trend as “sleep bulimia.”

Walker’s comparison of sleep and bulimia shows how people in modern society will often “purge” themselves of sleep during the week and binge on sleep during the weekends.

  This means that sleep will also help in long term retention of these motor skill improvements and that musicians (and those participating in other motor-skill intensive activities) who aren’t getting the sleep they need every day are at a huge disadvantage.