Caffeine cure for insomniacs

If you don't get enough sleep at night, be sure to drink a strong cup of coffee before trying to remember important facts - otherwise your sleep-deprived mind will play tricks with your memory, according to a European study.

A loss of sleep impairs the mind's ability to recall facts efficiently. Still in a dream-like state, the mind jumbles the memory so that you may claim with high confidence to remember things that in fact never happened, typically due to strong semantic associations with actually encoded events, say the researchers at four universities in Germany and Switzerland.

In other words, sleep deprivation prevents the mind from finishing its sorting and storing of memories. It is a bit like your computer warning you that some unsaved files may be lost if you reboot your computer without waiting for it to save everything first.