This article reveals what modern neuroscience has learned about sleep as it applies to learning and memory. I believe this information can be of great benefit not only to students looking to improve their study skills, but to anyone interested in improving their memory and learning potential.

Most of us think of sleep as a time of rest … a time when the brain
settles down, relaxes, and becomes quiet. After a busy day of attending classes, talking with friends, studying, and stressing out, the brain finally gets to shut down and take a break from it all. Sounds logical, right? Well, that’s not quite what happens. Actually, when you’re asleep, your brain is continuing to learn the material you’ve been exposed to during the day.

You Sleep, But Your Brain Works

Dozens of intriguing studies over the past several years show clearly
that your brain is active—very active—during sleep. (Reference 1-7) It’s busy doing something miraculous, something that we can’t even come close to explaining.

Basically, your brain goes on automatic pilot. Without your being aware of it, something inside your head comes alive and starts mulling over all the things you learned that day. It sorts through them, organizes them, considers them, calculates them, decides what’s important and what’s not.

From all the information that your brain soaked up during the day, it derives meaning. It works through unsolved problems and somehow comes up with answers. Its powers, however, extend even farther than that. A spooky awareness speeds through neural circuits. As it does so, it changes the physical structure of brain cells so that specific pieces of knowledge are etched more permanently in memory. In the neurologic literature, these miraculous processes are referred to as consolidation.

What your brain is doing, without any conscious effort on your part, includes:

• reviewing,
• sorting,
• organizing,
• prioritizing,
• problem solving, and
• memorizing.

All this is happening while you sleep! As you can see, effortless sleep-learning is not only possible, it is a reality.

The amazing truth is that learning continues after the actual studying is done. In fact, research indicates the maximum benefit of all your hard hours of studying comes about only after a good night’s sleep.

Furthermore, even though you may have stopped studying, knowledge and skills continue to improve over several nights of sleep. Although sleep on the first night following training offers the most dramatic benefit, subsequent nights of sleep continue to provide smaller, less pronounced gains.(Reference 2)

Consolidation and Physical Skills

Athletes, pianists, surgeons, and video game addicts take note: This process applies to learning not just information but motor skills as well. One recent study showed that sleep after practice enhanced the speed of skilled motor performance by 33.5 percent on average and reduced the error rate by 30 percent, as compared with corresponding intervals of wakefulness.(Reference 7)

To extend this concept just a little bit further: Amazingly, learning does not stop when practicing and studying end. It turns out that performance and learning improvement occur not only during sleep but also during periods of wakefulness. (Reference 2,7) After you finish reading a chapter, your brain goes to work on that information over the next few hours, slowly learning and consolidating it. This subconscious processing of learning information is above and beyond what you did consciously during your actual study session.

An everyday example of this subconscious processing is the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. Try as you might, when asked, to remember the name of a movie, store, or restaurant, you may find that you can’t. But several minutes or even hours later, it may come to you like a flash of lighting out of the blue. Why? Without your conscious knowledge, that spooky awareness we talked about earlier spreads through your neural networks, searching for the answer. When your brain finally finds the item you were seeking, it tosses it back up for your conscious mind to grasp. Imagine what happens when you throw a stone into a pond: The effect of the stone upon the water does not cease at impact. Long after the rock hits the water, waveforms slowly ripple out toward the periphery. So it is with the mind. When you ask something of it, the neural reverberations of the question (the “rock”) persist long after the question is asked.

Key Findings of Consolidation Research

So what, in brief, do we know about how the brain consolidates information?

• Development of procedural/motor skills does not stop when practice ends but continues over hours.
• Development of memory does not stop when studying ends but continues over hours.
• Neural activities during sleep contribute significantly to the formation of different types of memories and skills.
• For a given period of sleep vs. one of wakefulness, consolidation will be greater with sleep.
• The first nightly sleep period after practicing or studying is extremely important for starting consolidation of the skill or memory. Going without this initial first night of sleep will have a very negative effect on the consolidation of that particular skill or memory.

Making the Most of Sleep Learning (consolidation)

Share This Post:

New research out of Northwestern University’s Neuroscience Laboratory drastically changes our understanding of the brain.

The study, to appear in the April issue of Nature Neuroscience reveals that musical training not only alters the wiring of the cortex of the brain but also the brainstem.

Classical neuroscience teaches that the brainstem (the very
bottom portion of the brain that attaches to the spinal cord) is
basically a fixed and unchanging structure. This study clearly
indicates otherwise.

Additionally, the study also shows that children exposed to musical training have better equipped auditory processing for speech sounds. Nina Kraus, senior author of the study notes:

Increasing music experience appears to benefit all children — whether musically exceptional or not — in a wide range of learning activities. Our findings underscore the pervasive impact of musical training on neurological development. Yet music classes are often among the first
to be cut when school budgets get tight. That’s a mistake

Interestingly, the team at Northwestern has found in previous research that some learning disabled children have abnormalities in their brainstem that lead to impaired processing of sound and that furthermore these deficits can be improved with auditory training.

"We’ve found that by playing music — an action thought of as a function of the neocortex — a person may actually be tuning the brainstem," says Kraus. "This suggests that the relationship between the brainstem and neocortex is a dynamic and reciprocal one and tells
us that our basic sensory circuitry is more malleable than we previously thought."

For a related Smartkit article discussing the beneficial effect of music on brain power, click here. If you’d like to try to temporarily increase your spatial-temporal IQ, click here to listen to Mozart’s Sonata for two pianos K448.

Share This Post:

One of the greatest misunderstandings people have about the brain is their belief in “free energy”.

Hundreds of millions of students and workers all over the world consume drinks and pills in the hopes of magically relieving fatigue and boosting their energy levels without suffering any downside. Hence the popularity of Red Bull, Monster, Mountain Dew, Coke, Pepsi, energy pills, caffeine pills, amphetamines, cocaine, and of course coffee.

I’m a firm believer that when it comes to brain circuitry and energy metabolism, Newton’s Third Law still holds: Every action has an equal an opposite reaction.

Based on my years of studying the brain and expertise as a neurologist, I am deeply convinced that, on a fundamental level, the consequences of a chemical energizer are twofold:

• As high up as the drug brings you, you will afterwards sink to an equally commensurate low
• Pushing neural circuits into overdrive stresses the hardware, and leads to cumulative wear-and-tear type brain damage

In life, there are always tradeoffs, and everything has a benefit and a risk. Surely, there are times when it is worthwhile to consume a chemical energizer. The important point is to realize there is a downside to taking it, and therefore only use the minimal amount needed to get the job done.

Taking a large dose initially doesn’t mean the beneficial effect will last longer. It just means your handgun gun just magically became a nuclear bunker buster.

Back in college, I never thought twice about downing an oversize vanilla cappuccino to help get in the studying mood. In actuality, all that was probably needed was a few sips at the start and maybe another couple sips an hour or two later.

Just because Monster Energy shoves 16 ounces of caffeinated sugar into a can doesn’t mean you need to drink all of it.

Share This Post:

Sometimes, a picture really is worth a thousand words…

(Noever, R., J. Cronise, and R. A. Relwani. 1995. Using spider-web patterns to determine toxicity. NASA Tech Briefs 19(4):82. Published in New Scientist magazine, 27 April 1995.)

Nevertheless, over the next week, I have 2 informative commentaries on caffeine I’m getting ready to post

Share This Post:

Reading through the latest issue of Neurology Today, came across some interesting tidbits on how beneficial exercise can be for your brain:

• As mentioned in earlier posts, exercise leads to the creation of new brain cells in the hippocampus (the memory engine of the brain)
• A study from the Annals of Internal Medicine reveals that seniors who exercise three or more times per week were 60 percent less likely than their sedentary counterparts to develop dementia during the course of the six-year study
• Dr. Muriel Koehl and colleagues from the University of Bordeaux now believe that beta-endorphin, which is released during exercise, may play a pivotal role in regulating new brain cell growth. Endorphins are morphine like chemicals in the brain that mediate pleasure.
• A study from Neurology found that vigorous exercise in youth reduced the risk of Parkinson’s disease in men by 60 percent.

Share This Post:

About 2 months ago, a study came out in the British Medical Journal claiming that breast milk had no effect on infant brain development and intelligence.

This goes against what more than a dozen earlier studies have found.Just came across a new article on the topic in which Dr. Larry Gartner, professor emeritus of pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Chicago, claims the British Medical Journal study is flawed. Click here to read more.

Share This Post: