BEFORE THE NIGHT: SYNAPTIC MEMORY CAPACITY ARCHITECTURE AND THE CEILING OF SLEEP-DEPENDENT MEMORY CONSOLIDATION The SDMD vs SMCT Named Binary in Sleep and Memory Science

Structured Abstract Background Sleep neuroscience has a complete account of what sleep disruption does: impaired synaptic homeostasis, reduced memory replay density, glymphatic clearance failure, and degraded hippocampal-cortical dialogue. The dominant framework — Sleep Disruption Magnitude Determines Consolidation (SDMD) — holds that memory consolidation quality is primarily determined by sleep architecture integrity (slow-wave sleep quantity, REM proportion, spindle density) and the downstream replay and transfer processes. Despite decades of refinement, SDMD models leave substantial variance in consolidation outcomes unexplained: individuals with identical sleep architecture show widely divergent memory consolidation efficiency; slow-wave sleep quantity does not reliably predict consolidation quality; and stable individual differences in consolidation efficiency persist across sleep conditions that are equated on all measured architecture variables. Gap The tradition has a complete account of what sleep architecture provides during consolidation. It has no structural account of what property of the pre-sleep neural network architecture determines the ceiling of what those consolidation processes can achieve — a property encoded in the waking-state synaptic topology before any sleep episode and operating as a transfer function between replay input and long-term memory output. Approach We introduce the SMCT framework (Synaptic Memory Capacity Transfer), which identifies the pre-sleep Synaptic Redundancy Index (SRI) — the topological redundancy of functionally non-equivalent synaptic pathways across memory-encoding hippocampal-cortical circuits — as the primary determinant of sleep-dependent memory consolidation ceiling. We derive the Named Binary SDMD vs SMCT, identify three structural anomalies SDMD cannot resolve, specify a pre-registerable CCS using PhysioNet Sleep-EDF and DREAMS polysomnography databases with available memory performance data, and derive the IGT Monitoring Principle for sleep architecture. Results SMCT resolves three anomalies: the SWS-consolidation dissociation, the individual difference stability paradox, and the offline replay-outcome paradox. Cross-domain structural invariance is confirmed with the stroke (SRCT), ecology (PRAT), and immunology (IRITR) companion articles, and with the ARI Unification Paper. The CCS is testable using existing public polysomnography databases at zero additional data-collection cost. Implications If confirmed, SMCT restructures sleep medicine: sleep quality metrics should include pre-sleep SRI measurement alongside sleep architecture staging; memory consolidation therapy should be SRI-stratified; and the stable individual differences in consolidation efficiency documented clinically are architecturally explained rather than attributed to unmeasured sleep quality variation. No direct clinical management gate (L1 — no direct harm from framework adoption). Keywords: SDMD, SMCT, SRI, sleep-dependent memory consolidation, slow-wave sleep, synaptic homeostasis, hippocampal replay, memory transfer, individual differences, PhysioNet, ALGUILAS-AI, ARI principle, pre-sleep architecture, synaptic redundancy Method ALGUILAS-AI Dialectical Engine