They concentrate on the hippocampus -- part of the cerebral cortex which sits deep in the brain -- where short-term memories become long-term ones.

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First the team showed that they could use the state of a region of the brain, called the medial prefronal cortex, to predict how much deep, or slow-wave, sleep a person would have.

BBC: Boosting sleep 'may slow memory rot'

Although the neural pathways that encode habitual behavior appear to be located in deep brain structures known as the basal ganglia, it has been shown that the IL cortex is also necessary for such behaviors to develop.

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