The Most Powerful Learning Tool (That Doesn’t Involve Studying)

I’d like to talk about one of the most important things you can do for learning. It’s scientifically demonstrated to have a huge impact on your memory, attention and energy levels. Yet, tragically, it’s often the first thing many people jettison when they’re preparing for a big test. The Most Powerful Learning Technique The technique is sleep. Sleeping 7-8 hours per night has an enormous impact on your ability to learn. Cutting sleep, even for as little as one night, can have irreversible impacts on what you learn both before and after, in your fatigued state. Pulling all-nighters should be banned from your life as a valid tool to cram information. The costs are simply too high. Even if you’re not staying up for days on end trying to learn, few of us get the sleep we need to learn at our best. What You’re Doing When Sleeping Sleep is not a passive activity. Although it seems like you’re doing nothing but resting, the mind is highly active during your moments of slumber. Sleep is broken into different discrete phases, mostly falling into two catagories of REM (rapid eye-movement, aka dreaming) and NREM (non-REM, which includes deep sleep). While your head is on the pillow, your brain is engaging in very important work. This includes: Allowing glial cells (support cells between neurons) to shrink in size, so that chemical byproducts that result from waking activity can be flushed away with cerebrospinal fluid . Spindle events , 10-12 Hz electrical pulses, which are believed to play a role in making declarative memories permanent. Reorganization and consolidation of learned information , possibly related to improving the ability to reason abstractly and extend knowledge to new situations. [ 1 ] One of the first studies to demonstrate the importance of sleep to […]

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