Sleep to Remember: How Sleep Shapes Our Memories | Dr. Abdelrahman Rayan | TEDxHSRW

What happens to your day when we fall asleep? Neuroscientist Dr. Abdel Rayan explores how sleep helps the brain stabilize, reorganize, and integrate memories, turning the day’s experiences into tomorrow's memories. The talk shows that sleep isn't a passive break or wasted time, but an active process in which the brain uses experience to make memories last.
Filmed and edited by Fotocinema (Arkadiusz Tomala). Dr. Abdel Rayan is a neuroscientist and founder with a broad background spanning medicine, systems neuroscience, computational neuroscience, and mathematical modelling. His work explores how the brain reorganizes its activity as it moves between wakefulness and sleep, and how these changing brain states support memory consolidation.
At Radboud University and Radboudumc in Nijmegen, he uses AI and machine learning to explore sleep states across species, bridging animal and human sleep research to better understand how the brain processes experience and memories during sleep.
In his TEDx talk, Abdel invites the audience to rethink sleep: not as a passive break during the night, but as an active brain state in which the brain works with experience and memory. Drawing on neuroscience and the everyday experience of sleep, he explores how the brain stabilizes and reshapes memories, allowing parts of one day to be carried into the next. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx