SLEEP ON IT
We’ve all heard the expression, “sleep on it,” and automatically inferred that such action would somehow facilitate whatever the mental or intellectual task under consideration was. We all know how much better we feel after a good night’s sleep. However, from a scientific perspective, we still have much that we do not know as to exactly how and why sleep is so important to our learning process and to our overall mental wellbeing. Robert Stickgold reports on some of the latest research about how we learn and how sleep is a catalyst to the learning process (“Sleep on It.” Scientific American . October 2015, pp. 52–57):
“ Anything you think is important will be selectively retained while you are asleep. Two groups in Europe have shown that telling subjects who have been trained on a particular task that they will or will not be tested on that information after they sleep affects what happens during that sleep. As you might expect, only the information that subjects are told they will be retested on shows improvement the next day. In contrast, when subjects are trained in the morning, informing them that they will or will not be tested that evening does not seem to make any difference. Sleep, then, and not wakefulness, selectively strengthens memories that our brain deems valuable. ” (p. 57)
The point is for anything that you want to remember better, try to have a sleep cycle any time after your quality time with the content. Your brain will make the content a priority as it performs its nightly “defrag and OS updates.”
This has implications for all learning formats that extend beyond a night’s passage. Whether it is elementary school, college classes, or corporate training, anything that teachers and trainers can do to create presleep content focus will enhance the learning process.
The next time you find yourself tiring of new material, just announce that you are going to sleep on it. You will be in good—and smarter—company.
