A restful and sufficient amount of sleep helps the memory to save course contents during nighttime to retrieve them afterwards more easily. But of course, the old hint to put your documents under your pillow and hope that the content is wandering into your brain by itself is a fairy tale. “But, experiments of brain science again and again have proved the fact that we do need sleep for learning”, so the Austrian sleeping expert and Author Dr. med. h.c. Guenther W. Amann-Jennson.
Learning is not going to go astray
In the so-called non-declarative memory we are saving our knowledge about how we are doing certain things, for example how to enter key combinations, play an instrument or execute certain movements in sports. For example, when learning to present a poem in front of an audition most of the people do better after sleeping than before. “But, you have to have learned and exercised properly before the sleep has the desired effect”, emphasizes Amann-Jennson. Contrary to the non-declarative the declarative brain saves every knowledge contents. We need it for special learning contents like data, vocabulary, autobiographic or general knowledge that can’t always be connected with certain occurrences.
During sleep, the learned things get consolidated in the brain by getting securely anchored in the memory-processors. During alertness, the processes of absorption and decoding of new knowledge overlap. These permanent new inputs that stream in the brain, erase fresh memory traces that are not yet definitely anchored, again. The sleep supports the anchoring of the learned in that way that new contents can’t directly be absorbed neither by the declarative nor by the non-declarative memory. After a recreational sleep, the contents directly learned before can be recalled without effort. Out of this reason one can say “learning during sleep”.
Healthy sleep is the most important
Healthy sleep is characterized by falling asleep within 10 to 15 minutes, sleep through without big phases of alertness, and wake up after 7 to 8 hours of sleep, recreated and strengthened. Here, sleeping cycles are playing a decisive role. Only the one who really sleeps high quality is going through the single sleeping phases from light to deep sleep and REM-sleep 4 to 5 times per night. One cycle lasts about 90 minutes. “During deep sleep, rather vocabularies are dealt with, during REM-sleep movement patterns”, explains the sleeping expert. For saving into long-term memory several nights with sufficient sleep have to follow. Only then all jigsaw pieces become to one picture. “Another remarkable thing is: suddenly you find a solution during sleep you couldn’t think of during alertness. Whatever you want to learn, it is decisive to recreational sleep the following nights”, he further underlines.
Out of this reason, it is not advisable for students to learn the night through. Better learn intensely during the most effective time – with most people from 10.00 to 12.00 a.m. and from 4.00 to 8.00 p.m. – and process and consolidate the new knowledge during sleep. In this context it is remarkable that highly gifted people sleep particularly much. It is said, that Albert Einstein for example slept up to 12 hours a day.
Leave a Reply