Sleeping Reinforces Learning
The importance of sleep before a big test (or big anything that forces you to use your brain) should not come as no surprise to you. The reasoning is that sleep keeps us alert and orient, and our brain does best when it gets its proper amount of sleep. In the latest issue of Nature Neuroscience, scientists give us some additional insight into sleep and its influence on information retention and learning.
During sleep, our brain stores and processes what we have learned throughout the day. This state of information processing seems to be more effective in children than in adults, according to Dr. Ines Wilhelm, a researcher at the University of Tubingen’s Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology. And this is also the reason why sleep is so important in a child’s formative years. A brain of a child transforms the material that is subconsciously learned into active and tangible knowledge during sleep. Dr. Wilhelm also stated that sleep supports learning in adults too, but not to the same extent as it does in children. This may partially explain why children generally learn quicker than adults.
In a study conducted by Dr. Wilhelm, two groups of subjects’ memories were tested. The first group was children between the ages of 8 and 11 and the second group was what we considered “young adults.” Following a night of sleep or a day awake, both groups memories were tested. The test was to see if they were able to guess the predetermined series of actions, without being aware of the existence of the series itself. The result was that both age groups could remember a large number of elements from the row of numbers than those that remained awake during the day. However, the children performed much better than the “young adults” at this task.
In a study conducted by Dr. Wilhelm, two groups of subjects’ memories were tested. The first group was children between the ages of 8 and 11 and the second group was what we considered “young adults.” Following a night of sleep or a day awake, both groups memories were tested. The test was to see if they were able to guess the predetermined series of actions, without being aware of the existence of the series itself. The result was that both age groups could remember a large number of elements from the row of numbers than those that remained awake during the day. However, the children performed much better than the “young adults” at this task.
During sleep, memory is transformed into something that makes future learning easier, and subconscious knowledge becomes tangible and active knowledgeable—and thus more easily retrievable. Children sleep longer and deeper, and thus seem to take in more information than adults do on a regular basis.
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