Wouldn’t life be easier if there was a known secret
to success?
How exactly can one obtain everything to their highest potential?
According to Gary Marcus, in his book Guitar Zero, and Jeffrey Kluger’s article,
Shh! Genius at Work, in Time magazine, it seems that a lot of deliberate
practice and some sleep should do the job just fine.
Cognitive psychologist,
Gary Marcus explores many concepts in his book, Guitar Zero, he explains that there
are a plethora of methods that one can choose when learning something new. This
is a known fact among all students, scholars, and most of society. You hear the
common saying that everyone learns in their own way because each person is an
individual. Another common saying that Marcus uses generously is a very simple
concept, “practice makes perfect,” in saying this, he again demonstrates the
need for practice in order to achieve success. In accordance to the rule of practicing,
we have all heard of the need for repetition and by repeating certain concepts
over and over again, we have found that your ability to remember those concepts
greatly increases, but is it possible for our brain to be doing work while we
are unconscious?
A recent article in Time
magazine, written by Jeffery Kluger, examines just this issue. It is possible
that the amount of sleep we get can be correlated to the amount of information
we retain, but exactly what type of sleep is necessary for us to retain more
information. Kluger explains how there are two principal sleep cycles that we
all cycle throughout the night. Being a neuroscience minor this comes as no news;
Dr. Leidahl spent many a lecture describing the importance of sleep before an
exam. Among the two cycles of sleep one is called Rapid Eye movement (REM) and
the other nonrapid eye movement (NREM). We first start with a light NREM sleep,
during this cycle we can be easily awakened and many of our senses are still
aware. Our body steadily continues to progress to a deeper level of sleep, in which
our heart rate and respiration accelerate. As it turns out, our brain activity
as EEGs have determined, also accelerates. Have you ever had a dream in which
you are falling and you suddenly wake up about to fall off of your bed? This is
a function of dreaming, our muscles are paralyzed allowing us to act out that
which we are dreaming.
Most of our REM sleep
comes in the last four hours of our night of rest, as cognitive neuroscientist
Jessica Payne of Notre Dame University states, our dreams in NREM phase have a
tendency to be literal, but once we hit the REM cycles, we begin having
something she calls a binding error. This is when we have a dream that doesn’t entirely
make sense. In our dream we can be simply watching TV and lounging on our couch
and the next thing you know you are riding a roller coaster as six flags. This
binding error suggests that sleeping allows us explore other avenues of our
brains that we are consciously unable to do. Researchers at UCLA and the
University of California had a group of volunteers solve a type of word puzzle
known as the remote association test (RAT), in this test participants are
presented three words and asked to find a fourth word to link them. The test
was taken twice, with a 40 min nap in-between, results show that the sleep sharpened
the brains ability to find links among words; these links wouldn’t have been
found normally. According to this article, when you sleep, you brain has a
chance to find the better answer to a certain problem, or task.
What is it though, that
makes this happen? Think of your computer, Kruger states that your brain is
comparable to a hard drive; it is able to complete many tasks at the same time.
The conscious brain works on one task at time, but the unconscious brain is
able to work on multiple tasks, allowing it to reach into places it couldn’t before.
Harvard Psychologist Shelley Carson also points out that dopamine is another
reward key player. The levels of dopamine in our brain increase in pleasure
centers when we sleep thus, when we are exploring new and innovative areas, the
creative juices (dopamine levels) are continuously flowing! It is true however that those who are
generally more creative may have an advantage but as Marcus points out, that
genetics give a clear advantage to those in musical ability as well. While
sleeping isn’t going to make you the next Einstein, it is interesting to see
our brain reaching different levels in its different states.
So what exactly is it
that Marcus and the researcher from this article are saying? There may not be a
concrete way for us to achieve success, but in my opinion, a lot of it comes
down to personal potential. Human beings are able to be involved in numerous
amounts of activities, none of which have to be similar to one another. A
really good friend of mine enjoys math just as much as she enjoy drawing. These
innate abilities and interests that we each have give us the extra push we need
in order to go out and achieve our dreams. Marcus argues that a lot of his
ability to pick up and learn the guitar at the ripe age of 38 was due to his
achieving his personal potential. There is no set time a caterpillar must
become a butterfly and as each person already knows, we are all different; our
ability to blossom also depends on that. There are no time restraints on
potential, do what you have to do when you want to do it. To each their own,
take your time, get some sleep, or stay up all night, at the end of the day,
you will achieve on your own personal balance of talent and hard work.
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