
Ability to learn is affected by the timing of sleep - duaneb
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=ability-to-learn-is-affected-by-the-12-03-24
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espeed
Science Daily had article a few months ago on how sleep prunes the "noise"
from the brain...

"Sleep researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine
and Public Health believe it is more evidence for their theory of "synaptic
homeostasis." This is the idea that synapses grow stronger when we're awake as
we learn and adapt to an ever-changing the environment, that sleep refreshes
the brain by bringing synapses back to a lower level of strength. This is
important because larger synapses consume a lot of energy, occupy more space
and require more supplies, including the proteins examined in this study."

"Sleep — by allowing synaptic downscaling — saves energy, space and material,
and clears away unnecessary "noise" from the previous day, the researchers
believe. The fresh brain is then ready to learn again in the morning"

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090402143455.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090402143455.htm)

~~~
sek
What is better now, learning in the morning or in the evening?

Nobody knows for sure is suppose, but i will think about it all day....

Does anybody has the same problem? When i read this stuff i will think about
it every time i learn. I can't even drink coffee any more without thinking
about the health implications i know about.

~~~
obtu
Received wisdom from my school system says that pupils are more attentive in
their first three hours of the morning, then their attention drops as they run
low on sugar; they are less focused in the afternoon.

Discounting the effect of metabolism (by comparing the afternoon period with
the after dinner period, or even by comparing a normal day and one spent
vaguely awake after an all-nighter), the Italian study's "spring-cleaning"
thesis about low-level background activity rising during the day and lowering
signal to noise for some mental processes rings true to me.

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karamazov
To my knowledge, this is pretty standard advice among students - review your
notes before you sleep to help you remember them.

The explanation I've heard is that sleep is when long-term memories are
formed; something put into short-term memory will have less time to erode if
you sleep right afterwards.

~~~
sek
I have heard a similar advice, but in the morning before class. Your brain has
the most capacity in the morning, because over the day all the other
information makes you exhausted and the amount you can learn on a single day
is limited.

It is way easier to learn in the evening, that is what most students do
anyway.

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clicks
Okay, I have to ask this now: why is it then that I keep hearing from my
friends at CMU and MIT that it's totally normal for them to go on 2 hour
sleep/night? I hear this from professors too, " _Oh, when I was your age I was
working x many hours and getting by on not more than 3 hours of sleep a day!_
" By the way I'm someone who comfortably sleeps 8 hrs./day -- and in
comparison to my friends I never received marks that were very impressive.

The examples in front of me (that I have known personally) who're doing so
well -- or the science journals that say the opposite -- who do I believe?

~~~
psyklic
Short answer -- your friends have 6 hours/night more study time than you. My
bet is that if both of you studied the same amount of time but you got 8 hours
and they 2, you would perform better, assuming your study habits are equally
good.

What I've learned is that sleep _IS_ important -- it's better to sleep than
not to sleep. HOWEVER, staying up late and memorizing material over and over
is definitely worth more than sleep is (for recall purposes). If you don't
have time to review X due to sleep and X is on the exam, then you definitely
lose out, right?

I have been an 8 hour/night sleeper. The attitude there is that I must get 8
hours of sleep, even at the expense of other things, such as making sure I
obsessively know every single little fact in the material. 2 hour/night people
care about memorizing every last detail of the material, at the expense of
sleep.

I found I memorized best by memorizing 10-12 pages of notes so I could recite
them from memory, recalling them all lying in bed, then recall them in the
morning and touch up throughout the day. You just can't squeeze that in if you
get 8 hours/sleep on an overloaded schedule!

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ISloop
That makes a lot of sense. I've often found myself dreaming about a problem I
struggled with before going to bed, then magically "realizing" the solution
immediately after waking up in the morning.

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xenophanes
Memorizing arbitrary words for a study is a terrible proxy for meaningful
learning.

~~~
gruseom
That reminds me of the creativity studies that get promoted in the press these
days, most prominently in Jonah Lehrer's new book. They all assume they know
how to measure creativity!

~~~
xenophanes
David Deutsch criticizes this stuff in his recent book. You might like it.

<http://beginningofinfinity.com/>

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PhilipDaineko
I recommend to read Brain Rules by John Medina. <http://www.brainrules.net/>.

He explains in really simple way how brain works and what is best for brain to
keep evolving and getting smarter. One of the rules: Sleep well - think well

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w1ntermute
That's very interesting. I've been studying kanji in the morning because I'm a
morning person, making it easier in the short run, but it looks like working
on it in the evenings is actually better for long term retention.

~~~
ekianjo
For kanji, it works best to keep practising them several times every single
day. Every 2-3 hours. You'll be able to learn a lot of them, much faster this
way. You can use the open source software anki to plan which ones to review on
a regular basis.

~~~
w1ntermute
I'm already using Anki. As for the every 2-3 hours thing, it's hard to fit
that into my schedule. There's an Android app called Ankidroid though that I
haven't looked into. If it supports syncing with your desktop deck, I'll try
to use that to fit in some practice every few hours.

~~~
ekianjo
Yes it does, and it's available through the open source appstore on Android
(that I recommend as well).

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aangjie
My anecdotal experience has been that short naps between reading works
brilliantly in terms of retaining the concepts. I always used to take a nap
after reading for about 40min - 1hr in my college days.

~~~
PaperclipTaken
I have had the same experiences. After a given amount of hard studying
(anywhere from an hour to a few hours), I find that I cannot maintain focus
anymore. A short nap always fixes the problem, and when I come back to it
things usually stick much better.

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6ren
The second comment made me think insight works as a side-effect of memory
consolidation: transforming short-term memory to long-term involves linking it
to existing memories. This may reveal two kinds of insights: 1,
straightforward connections to prior knowledge (oh, this is like that); 2, by
factoring out known commonalities from a new memory, connections within the
new memory itself may become obvious.

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ekianjo
I don't know if this is a cultural thing, but my parents have always told me,
as a kid, to read my classnotes for a few minutes before sleeping. In my
experience this works pretty well. Glad to see there is now some science to
support it.

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dvdhsu
I wonder what happens during polyphasic sleep, where you sleep multiple times
per day. Of course, the amount of sleep you get each time is far less (I'm
trying a three-hour nap at night, then three twenty-minute naps throughout the
day), but it's entirely REM sleep [1].

REM sleep is also when "memories are consolidated" [2], so multiple REM sleeps
throughout the day should drastically improve one's information retention and
therefore one's learning.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REM_rebound>

2\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye_movement_sleep#Memory...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye_movement_sleep#Memory-
related_theories)

~~~
gwern
Well, obviously there's not going to be any studies on such a nichey niche of
a topic. There is a good way to measure memory performance, statistics kept by
a spaced repetition flashcard system with a few hundred or thousands of
flashcards, but the overlap between SRSers and polyphasicers seems low. The
one example I know of, an Anki user on LessWrong, reported that his statistics
were badly hurt during his polyphasic experiment.

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user2459
I always figured it was because I had less other things to think about between
me and the next morning. I could learn something and think about it a little
while I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep VS trying to learn something
and then shift to some other cognitive activities afterward.

