Sleep Enhances Memory and Learning

Just before you climb under your duvet, you carefully fix your room. You scatter a few drops of incense on your pillow, put on some headphones, and place a strange-looking band over your scalp. Then you go to sleep. The ritual takes just a few minutes, but you hope this could speed up your learning of a diverse range of skills: whether you are trying to master the piano, tennis or fluent French. You will not recall a single aspect of the night’s “training” – but that doesn’t matter: your performance the next morning should be better, all the same.

The reality is that the idea of learning as you sleep was once thought very unlikely, but there are several ways – both low- and hi-tech – to try to help you acquire new skills as you doze. I want to stress here that while there is no method that will allow you to acquire a skill completely from scratch while you are unconscious, that doesn’t mean that you still can’t use sleep to boost your memory. Believe it or not but during the night, our brain busily processes and consolidates our recollections from the day before, and there could be ways to enhance that process.

Okay given that we spend a third of our lives in the land of nod, it is little wonder that sleep learning has long captured the imagination of artists and writers. In most incarnations, it involved the unconscious mind absorbing new information from a recording playing in the background. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, for instance, a Polish boy learns English after having slept through a radio talk by George Bernard Shaw; the authoritarian government soon uses the same technique to brainwash its subjects. , Lately in The Simpsons, Homer buys a tape to subliminally reduce his appetite as he sleeps, only to find that it is instead changing his vocabulary. When his wife, Marge, asks if his diet is working, the normally inarticulate Homer replies: “Lamentably, no. My gastronomic rapacity knows no satiety”.

Techniques To Enhance Your Memory Cells:

The light sleep of stages 1 and 2 have been shown to be important in helping the brain being plastic to learning new material. I am saying that this also points to an explanation for why a 90-minute nap in the day can help people remember material they just learned. And why “sleeping on it” often helps people mentally digest their situation.

It has often been said that in a normal night’s sleep, the majority of the stage 1 and 2 sleep happens in the second half of the night. Well if you cut your sleep short, you may not learn as much as you could from the previous day’s events. Although it has long been known that a period of sleep helps in solving problems, new research found that the effect is greater for difficult problems than for easy problems.

Motor memory is facilitated by sleep, and new evidence shows motor imagery is also consolidated in sleep. And that this occurs during stages 1 and 2, not REM and stage 3.

Skeptics point out that persons with high intelligence quotients or good at school do not necessarily sleep more than others.

Memory formation And Abstract Terms:

It may sound nice that sleep is particularly important in learning higher-order abstract concepts. Research has found a significant correlation between the level of improvement in tests of learning and the amount of slow-wave sleep obtained. I can’t believe I am saying this but people consolidate the new learning much better after a period of sleep than during a waking day. Even an afternoon nap helps.

Slow wave (deep) sleep promotes episodic declarative memory consolidation. Many times this is the more important type of memory for schoolwork, in contrast with procedural memory which is important for physical actions. This works wonderfully that daytime naps are particularly useful for consolidating new procedural memories. Indeed, electroencephalogram tests of nappers find the more spindle events produced, the better the napper is equipped to learn.

The decline in the amount of time spent in slow wave sleep among elderly people may explain why older people have a harder time learning new things that younger people. It is indeed hard to teach an old dog new tricks, partly because the dog’s sleep patterns have changed.

Corrective School Timings:

Our students as they go through adolescence, their body’s natural internal clock tends to favor a later sleep time and later wake time. This, combined with the value of more sleep in teens, leads to the conclusion that school start times for older students may need to be later to achieve both satisfactory sleep time and to optimize sleep quality.

It was shown in the Minneapolis Public School District that this could be achieved by delaying school start times to better coincide with older students’ natural sleep time. 

Health Wellness:

Not surprisingly, this improvement in sleep was accompanied by improvement in attendance and enrollment rates, increased daytime alertness and decreased student-reported depression. For example studies have shown that when adolescences get more sleep they get better grades, reduce their risk of drowsy driving accidents and reduce risk of obesity and the metabolic and nutritional deficits associated with insufficient sleep. 

Healthy Habits for Sleeping:

The Mayo Clinic is a respected research hospital in Rochester, Minnesota. It gives these six suggestions for getting a good night’s sleep.

0. Stay on schedule.

0. Pay attention to what you eat and drink. Don’t go to bed hungry or stuffed. And avoid caffeine, nicotine and alcohol before bed.

0. Create a calm, restful sleep environment. Make your room as cool, quiet and dark as possible.

0. Limit daytime naps.

0. Exercise during the day.

0. Manage your worries. Try to calm any worries or concerns you might have before going to bed. You could write them down so that they are out of your head and on paper. You could spend a couple minutes getting organized for the next day. Or you could try some meditation and deep breathing to calm your brain. 

Sleep Aids:

In order to analyze the effect of sleep on classroom learning, Scullin and colleagues (2) gave undergraduate students with no previous exposure to economics a lecture on supply and demand. It happened that students were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The first group watched the lecture in the morning and came back in the evening to take a test. The second group watched the lecture in the evening and came back in the morning to take a test. In this way, the time from lecture to test was held constant, but only the second group slept in between the lecture and test. The test was divided into two parts. Half of the questions were very similar to the types of supply and demand questions that were used as examples during the lecture. The other half of the questions were called “integration” questions that required students to integrate both supply and demand information to solve novel complex problems.

The results showed that pupils in the sleep group performed about 8% better on the problems that were similar to those from the lecture. But on the novel problems, pupils who had gotten sleep before taking the test performed 32% higher than those who had not slept! In other words, students retained more information after sleeping, but their ability to understand and apply that information received the biggest benefit with sleep.

Adequate Food Pattern for Sleeping:

Before you think there is one surprising bit of research at the meeting was a study that suggests a midnight snack can undo the memory benefits usually conferred by getting enough sleep. Take a note that a team from UCLA found that mice that ate during their normal sleep time scored worse on memory tests than mice that ate during their normal waking hours.

“Those animals show severe deficits in their recall,” says neuroscientist Christopher Colwell . And the deficit occurred even if the animals were getting a normal amount of sleep, he says. The finding suggests that persons who wake up during the night and want to snack should probably abstain, Colwell says, if they want their memory to work normally the next day.

It’s best-known that sleep patterns tend to change as we age. Unfortunately, the deep memory-strengthening stages of sleep start to decline in our late 30s. An important study by Walker and colleagues found that adults older than 60 had a 70% loss of deep sleep compared to young adults ages 18 to 25. Old adults had a harder time remembering things the next day, and memory impairment was linked to reductions in deep sleep. It is tempting to know that the researchers are now exploring options for enhancing deep stages of sleep in this older age group.

“While we have limited medical treatments for memory impairment in aging, sleep actually is a potentially treatable target,” Walker says. “By restoring sleep, it might be possible to improve memory in older people.”

For younger people, especially pupils, Stickgold offers additional advice. “Realize that the sleep you get the night after you study is at least as important as the sleep you get the night before you study.” When it comes to sleep and memory, he says, “you get very little benefit from cutting corners.”