why are we never aware of the exact moment we fall asleep?
In: Biology
What people haven’t mentioned so far is that you actually have two forms of memory. You have:
* Short-term memory that handles everything you do right now and keeps your train of thought going.
* Long term memory, that remembers things for more than just a few minutes.
Moving things from short term memory to long term memory is called consolidation, and when you’re falling asleep not only are your thought processes moving to a less conscious level (not really shutting down, but becoming less active and doing different things) but this process of storing memory is disrupted (or at least less effective).
So not only will you not remember the exact moment you fall asleep, but you will also have problems remembering a few seconds or even minutes before the moment when you fall asleep. For example, if you were reading you might not remember the last page you were on.
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