Before college, I remember getting around eight hours of
sleep every night. I can’t tell you how many times I have been told by
professors, parents, and even doctors that without sleep we won’t be able to
function as well in school. I admit (along with probably most of the school
population) that I do not get the suggested eight hours of sleep every night
anymore now that I am in college. I always thought the biggest problem with
limited sleep was that we wouldn’t be able to think as quickly from being
tired, but a study by the University of London have proved me very wrong.
The participants of the study were taught words of a
fictional language, which had a rule relating words to each other that was not
taught. Participants were able to learn the new language easily, but they were
unable to use it to apply to words that they had not been trained for until
they had a weeks rest. The results from the study were thought to suggest a
relationship between processing rule-based information and sleep and that
sleeping allows for consolidating and understanding new information.
I enjoyed reading about this study because it had a very
specific type of learning that the researchers believed was important to be
processed during sleep instead of just talking about learning as a whole. I
would be interested to read more about further findings in the study and if
they discover why the brain needs sleep to process rule-base information.
Sleeping is obviously a very big issue for college students
who are staying up late every week to study for tests or finishing projects. I
think this study is a very good representation of why we need to work harder to
get sleep because in the end by staying up to study we are diminishing our
ability to actually learn the material. I would suggest any student to read
this article so they too can understand that we are not helping ourselves by
not sleeping enough.
I completely agree with you as well as the article! In my Neuroscience class a couple weeks ago, we had a discussion about how sleep is a very important part of our lives because sleep is when we can process through all of our memories of the day. With sleep we can be more attentive in class and be able to process information more instead of falling asleep in class and not being able to retain information, which then results in staying up late more to cram. I also learned in my Neuroscience class that people can die as a result of not sleeping, so getting enough sleep is very important for learning as well as for the sake of keeping our body and mind alive and functioning.
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