Sleep and Learning

The importance of sleep is widely understood in the scientific and educational community alike. Students are taught in introductory psychology and neuroscience courses that sleep is crucial for a multitude of reasons. Teachers often recommend that their students be sure to get enough sleep, especially before an exam, but why is this? In Eitan Schechtman’s article, “State of the art on targeted memory reactivation: Sleep your way to enhanced cognition”, it is explained that there is no doubt that sleep is important in the consolidation of memories. Memory consolidation is the time between encoding and retrieval, and how successful one is at this will determine if they are able to retrieve a memory or not. More specifically it is deep, or slow wave sleep that is the most important for the process of memory consolidation and the longer you are in slow wave sleep, the more effective memory consolidation will be. Due to the fact that when one is sleeping there is very little external stimulation, this is the perfect time for memory consolidation to occur, and when this is happening the same cells fire in the same order as they did when learning was initially taking place. Schechtman’s research studied the effect of targeted memory reactivation, or TMR, being used to manipulate memories. This is using external cues, such as auditory or olfactory cues, related to what someone has learned to reactivate a memory in order to improve memory consolidation. For his study, they tested participants learning the spatial location of images paired with auditory cues. After one had learned the position of the images they then went to sleep. During slow wave sleep, the sound that the participants had learned to associate with a specific image was presented, unbeknownst to them. When the participants woke up their memory was tested again and they found that their memory of the spatial location of an object was improved when TMR was used. In conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, memories can produce counterproductive and detrimental effects. So, in their next study they used TMR to try and “enhance forgetting” by using inhibitory learning that competes with previous learning. They had three groups of images, and each group was associated with a different arbitrary sound. Once the participants had learned all three of these groups successfully, they were told that they had to remember one group and forget the other two groups. During initial learning, the results were the same for both of the groups that they were supposed to forget. However, for one of the two groups that participants were told to forget, they presented the sound associated with that group during slow wave sleep to try and enhance the suppression of that memory. When tested again after they woke up, there was a significant difference between the two groups, seeming to show that in this case TMR can be used for motivated memory suppression.

The article entitled, “Let Teenagers Sleep In“, written by journalist and high school science teacher Henry Nicholls and published in the New York Times talks also about the importance of sleep. Young children have a natural schedule, unlike adolescents, to go to bed and wake up early. However after puberty, adolescents brains are rewired, creating a natural tendency to stay up and wake up later. Additionally, there are other factors that contribute to these tendencies. With plenty of homework, many extracurriculars, and technology at their fingertips it should come as no surprise that one out of every four high school students does not get the amount of sleep per night recommended by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, a total of eight hours. It also does not help that school start times are early. From data collected in 2015, 86 percent of high schools start before 8:30 and one in ten start even as early as 7:30. Without a sufficient amount of sleep, students will see their memory impaired, ultimately leading to suffering grades. It also does not help that in addition to lack of sleep, adolescents brain’s are at their least active in their 24-hour cycle at these early times in the day. In addition to impaired memory, lack of sleep can go on to also lead to increased mood disorders along with physical ailments such as hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. It has been proven that schools that have implemented later start times show that not only do students get more sleep, but additionally attendance and grades improve along with a reduced number of car accidents. 

While Schechtman focused on how sleep can be manipulated for learning, Nicholls elaborates on how lack of sleep can be aversive for learning along with a host of other problems. Nicholls' article emphasized to readers the importance of sleep, especially for high school students, in an attempt to inform and persuade parents to advocate for the support of later start times. Both articles show the various ways learning can be affected, with both an adequate and inadequate amount of sleep, and the possible benefits that can come when sleep is utilized to its full capacity. They illustrate that sleep is a place we can look in many ways to optimize learning and also ultimately the success of many people.

Works Cited

Nicholls, Henry. “Let Teenagers Sleep In.” The New York Times, 20 Sept. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/opinion/sunday/sleep-school-start-time-screens-teenagers.html?searchResultPosition=17.

Schouten, Daphne I., et al. “State of the Art on Targeted Memory Reactivation: Sleep Your Way to Enhanced Cognition.” Sleep Medicine Reviews, vol. 32, 2017, pp. 123–131., doi:10.1016/j.smrv.2016.04.002.