Study more or sleep? Glowing mice brains show us the answer
Daylight savings time begins next week on March 14, 2021. We’ll say goodbye to dark winter days….and one precious hour of sleep. Exhausted students may find themselves revisiting the familiar debate: is it better to stay up to study more or sleep?
Losing an hour of sleep might not seem like a big deal to our current generation of busy teenagers. Between classes, homework, college prep, family responsibilities, part-time jobs, sports, and me-time…what is an hour when you feel like you barely sleep anyway? At the same time, deciding if and how to study when exhausted is an ongoing struggle. Students can feel anxious or even guilty to let themselves rest.
It turns out that a solid night of sleep is actually the best (and most underrated) study tip to learn and memorize anything. This is the first of a multi-part series on memory where we explain the top, research-backed tips for memorizing anything.
Sleep is the ultimate brain-hack
Scientific research has long shown that sleep plays a critical role in learning and memory. Let’s first look at how our brains process information and remember things.
Memory is like a Lego set
RECALL MEANS ASSEMBLING THE RIGHT PIECES
Memories are not like video files. They are not stored in whole reels in your brain to replay or keep saved when they aren’t needed. A better analogy for memory is a Lego set. Your experiences are actually countless little bits of information. The problem is that these bits are stuffed all over your brain. Imagine a whole box of Legos dumped out on the table. Then you’ll see some pieces rolling under the couch, the base on the shelf, and the instructions in a totally different room.
When you recall something, your brain is actually working to reassemble the parts of your experience into a clearer memory. It is as though you are rushing around to gather up the different Lego pieces to rebuild the set. Of course, sometimes you just cannot remember how to put the pieces together. Sometimes you cannot find some essential part. And sometimes you end up swapping out so many replacement parts that the result looks completely different from the original. This is why remembering is a difficult and imperfect process.
ENTER THE LEGO ORGANIZING CREW: SLEEP
In this analogy, the Lego set would be anything you need to remember. Imagine the parts of a cell for Biology class, a list of Spanish vocabulary words, or your new ZOOM schedule all broken into tiny lego pieces. The Lego builder is your brain, running around to collect all the right pieces and rebuild the set. Then comes an organizing crew: SLEEP.
During sleep, your brain builds pathways that connect and consolidate the information you took in during the day. This would be like the organizing crew reviewing the Lego set instructions and sorting the parts you need by step, color, and size.
Your brain is also clearing out old unnecessary data to make space for your new memories. Or, in Lego-speak, you are putting away random pieces that you don’t need and throwing away broken ones. These steps help your brain rebuild that Lego set — or retrieve that memory — more quickly and accurately the next day.
Sleeping IS cramming
YOUR LEGO ORGANIZING CREW ALSO PRACTICES.
There is one more trick that your organizing crew does while you sleep: it practices. Researchers theorize that sleep is a time that the brain rehearses new information. In a 2014 study, scientists at NYU watched how sleep impacts learning using genetically engineered mice. The mice had fluorescent protein in their neurons — literally glowing brains. This helped the scientists track any changes in their brain structure that showed learning. In the experiment, the mice learned how to keep their balance on a spinning rod.
One group of mice went right to sleep (for seven hours) after this lesson. The scientists looked in the area of the brain associated with movement and found extensive growth of spiky cell spines. These “postsynaptic dendritic spines” work to connect brain cells together to share information. The growth of these brain bridges were evidence that the mice were learning.
Surprisingly, the brain cells continued to grow and reactivated while the mice slept. It was as though the mice were still practicing balancing on that rod. In other words, the brain continues to learn and consolidate information during sleep. So if you can’t decide whether to sleep or cram, sleeping is already a version of all-night cramming.
Well-rested students (and mice) do better
SLEEP DEPRIVATION HURTS LEARNING AND PERFORMANCE
Another group of mice trained for the same amount of time but stayed awake for those seven hours. Those sleep-deprived mice had fewer sprouting connections which showed that they learned less. When scientists re-tested the mice, the well-rested group did twice as well as the tired group.
The scientists allowed the tired mice to “catch up” on sleep on a different day. However, those mice still could not form the same amount of brain connections for this skill as the first group did on their first try. These mice were also less likely to hold onto the new connections they did make.
These types of experiments have counterparts with actual students. Scores of studies conclude that students really do better when they sleep. Sleeping poorly (or not at all) leads to worse test results and poorer ability to learn new things. In fact, an all-nighter hurts your ability to think, reason, and understand to the same degree as if you were taking your test drunk. Sleep is so central to learning that all Harvard freshmen are required to learn about sleeping habits in a class called Sleep 101.
What Does This Mean For Me?
If you are not sure if you should stay up to study more or sleep, go to sleep. Sleep is a foundational part of your education.
In our next post, we’ll discuss how to incorporate your learning style and self-care for high schoolers into a study plan that involves sleep. Until then, you can read more tips on how students can improve their memory and get some rest to optimize your brainpower.
If you are losing sleep over your homework, you can get free online homework help through UPchieve. UPchieve is a nonprofit that connects Title 1 High School students to free online tutors 24/7. Check to see if your school qualifies.
Originally published at https://upchieve.org on March 12, 2021.
