Sleep and Education

Today's students need more sleep. I stumbled across an interesting article highlighting the importance of sleep to the brain. The article states,

"that while we are peacefully asleep our brain is busily processing the day’s information. It combs through recently formed memories, stabilizing, copying and filing them, so that they will be more useful the next day. A night of sleep can make memories resistant to interference from other information and allow us to recall them for use more effectively the next morning. And sleep not only strengthens memories, it also lets the brain sift through newly formed memories, possibly even identifying what is worth keeping and selectively maintaining or enhancing these aspects of a memory. When a picture contains both emotional and unemotional elements, sleep can save the important emotional parts and let the less relevant background drift away. It can analyze collections of memories to discover relations among them or identify the gist of a memory while the unnecessary details fade—perhaps even helping us find the meaning in what we have learned."

Many of today's students engage in email, blogs and chat rooms until the wee hours of the night, and most come to school weary. Now we find out that they also come to school with a brain still trying to catch up on the copying and the filing of the day's memories.

The study goes deeper into the importance of sleep.

"But sleep’s effects on memory are not limited to stabilization. Over just the past few years, a number of studies have demonstrated the sophistication of the memory processing that happens during slumber. In fact, it appears that as we sleep, the brain might even be dissecting our memories and retaining only the most salient details. In one study we created a series of pictures that included either unpleasant or neutral objects on a neutral background and then had people view the pictures one after another. Twelve hours later we tested their memories for the objects and the backgrounds. The results were quite surprising. Whether the subjects had stayed awake or slept, the accuracy of their memories dropped by 10 percent for everything. Everything, that is, except for the memory of the emotionally evocative objects after night of sleep. Instead of deteriorating, memories for the emotional objects actually seemed to improve by a few percent overnight, showing about a 15 percent improvement relative to the deteriorating backgrounds. After a few more nights, one could imagine that little but the emotional objects would be left. We know this culling happens over time with real-life events, but now it appears that sleep may play a crucial role in this evolution of emotional memories."

As more research is done, sleep becomes even more important, not just to memory but to learning as well, as the authors of this article, Robert Stickgold and Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen exclaim.

"Adding to the excitement, recent discoveries show that sleep also facilitates the active analysis of new memories, enabling the brain to solve problems and infer new information. In 2007 one of us (Ellenbogen) showed that the brain learns while we are asleep. The study used a transitive inference task; for example, if Bill is older than Carol and Carol is older than Pierre, the laws of transitivity make it clear that Bill is older than Pierre. Making this inference requires stitching those two fragments of information together. People and animals tend to make these transitive inferences without much conscious thought, and the ability to do so serves as an enormously helpful cognitive skill: we discover new information (Bill is older than Pierre) without ever learning it directly.
The inference seems obvious in Bill and Pierre’s case, but in the experiment, we used abstract colored shapes that have no intuitive relation to one another, making the task more challenging. We taught people so-called premise pairs—they learned to choose, for example, the orange oval over the turquoise one, turquoise over green, green over paisley, and so on. The premise pairs imply a hierarchy—if orange is a better choice than turquoise and turquoise is preferred to green, then orange should win over green. But when we tested the subjects on these novel pairings 20 minutes after they learned the premise pairs, they had not yet discovered these hidden relations. They chose green just as often as they chose orange, performing no better than chance.
When we tested subjects 12 hours later on the same day, however, they made the correct choice 70 percent of the time. Simply allowing time to pass enabled the brain to calculate and learn these transitive inferences. And people who slept during the 12 hours performed significantly better, linking the most distant pairs (such as orange versus paisley) with 90 percent accuracy. So it seems the brain needs time after we learn information to process it, connecting the dots, so to speak—and sleep provides the maximum benefit."

If you want to help your child in school start with making sure they get a good night's sleep. It will do wonders! Blessings!