Sleep your way to a smarter you

Have you ever felt so sleepy in between classes, especially when the lectures are long and you feel like whatever you learned goes out of your brain by the next class?

Well what if there was a simple way to make you remember information easily and for a longer period time as well as keep you awake for that second or third lecture?

A study from the University Of Notre Dame recently discovered that going to sleep shortly after learning new material is beneficial for recall, so sleeping after a class makes you remember the contents of that lecture more vividly after some sleep.

Psychologist Dr. Jessica Payne and colleagues from the University of Notre Dame conducted a research to 207 students who get more or less six hours of sleep a day and ask them to study some declarative and semantic word pairs at 9am and asked them to return for testing in 30 minutes, 12 hours and 24 hours later.

Declarative memory refers to the ability to consciously remember facts and events, and can be broken down into episodic memory (memory for events) and semantic memory (memory for facts about the world).

At the 24-hour retest, with all subjects having received both a full night of sleep and a full day of wakefulness, subjects' memories were better when sleep occurred shortly after learning, rather than following a full day of wakefulness.

Try to imagine the greatness if you get to recall or remember something that you learned the day before very easily all because you slept for a bit.

Why does the brain recall so well after sleeping? Well it is because during sleep, you brain is reorganizing and restructuring memories that you have absorbed during the day.

Metaphorically think of you brain as a storage office for information where every day you give the secretary at the front desk files like the ‘what is the definition of advertising’ file and the ‘where did I put my car keys’ file.

When your body goes to sleep, that secretary has time to organize all your information into the right folders and the right drawers for easy retrieval later.

If you do not go asleep, your brain is going to constantly fill that front desk with files and files of information and the secretary would not have time to rearrange these information.

So you see, sleeping does not mean that your brain takes a break too. It is the only time where it has the capability to arrange and organize all those facts inside your head, cleaning and throwing out useless old information to make space for new stuff to go inside your head the next day.

Therefore it is all right to take that 20 minute nap before the next class or doze for a bit with that thick book on your chest after spending an hour memorizing dates and terms, you brain needs it and on top of that, it makes you smarter.