The real surprise came in the results of the third group of participants. Despite getting two full nights of natural sleep after initial learning, having their sleep doused with alcohol on the third night still resulted in almost the same degree of amnesia—40 percent of the knowledge they had worked so hard to establish on day 1 was forgotten. The overnight work of REM sleep, which normally assimilates complex memory knowledge, had been interfered with by the alcohol. More surprising, perhaps, was the realization that the brain is not done processing that knowledge after the first night of
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