Friday, May 7, 2010

Nap Time

Earlier in class we were discussing how different people learn, memory and most other things that go along with that. I came across an article that relates sleeping to better memory and learning. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100422153753.htm

"...after nearly 100 years of debate about the function of dreams, this study tells us that dreams are the brain's way of processing, integrating and really understanding new information," explains senior author Robert Stickgold, PhD, Director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at BIDMC and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "Dreams are a clear indication that the sleeping brain is working on memories at multiple levels, including ways that will directly improve performance."

I tried relating this information to what we have learned in class this year. At the start of the year when discussing babies we learned that babies sleep quite a bit and continue to for quite a while. This is nature's way of letting them take in their surrounding's and grow physically and mentally. The first few years of life are very critical for learning new things and this new study shows sleeping can help that. I also tried to relate this to adolescent behavior. I know when I was in high school, sleeping was a rarity in my life and seemed to be for others as well. We would usually just "wing it" on test and homework but somehow at least manage to pass the class with a respectable grade. But maybe if we gave ourselves the chance to sleep more, school wouldn't have been so hard and we would have processed what we learned in classes better, making tests and homework not so bad after all. (Well, kind of.)

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