Memory and trauma the one most commonly affected by psychological trauma is long-term memory. Missing memories, changes to memory, intensified memories – all are cases of manipulations of long-term memory. Long-term memory is associated with many different areas of the brain including the hippocampus, amygdala, thalamus and hypothalamus, peripheral cortex and temporal cortex. The hippocampus and amygdala have been connected with transference of memory from short-term memory to long-term memory. Thalamus and hypothalamus, located in the forebrain, are part of the limbic system; they are responsible for regulating different hormones and emotional and physical reactions to situations, including emotional stress or trauma. The
Long-term memory task, a task closely comparable to tasks typically applied for testing human declarative memory: It is a one-trial task, hippocampus-dependent, not stressful and can be repeated within the same animal. Sleep deprivation reduces vigilance or arousal levels, affecting the efficiency of certain cognitive functions such as learning and memory. The theory that sleep benefits memory retention is not a new idea. It has been around since Ebbinghaus's experiment on forgetting in 1885. More recently studies have been done by Payne and colleagues and Holtz and colleagues. In Payne and colleague's experiment participants were randomly selected and split into two groups.