“Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
– Benjamin Franklin, 1758
Cramming is a ritual for students across the globe. Whether it is finishing off an assignment or working through lecture slides, cramming involves staying up late and pilling as much information as possible into the brain the night before an exam. What we know about sleep and memory consolidation suggests that forgoing sleep to fill the brain with as much information is a terrible way to prepare for an exam.
Sleep occupies a third of our lifespan. It is important for a many different physiological functions, from cardiac health to memory consolidation. Is is the facet of memory consolation that we will explore. Sleep is an intensively active time for the brain, especially for reorganizing and restructuring memory from short to long-term. This consolidation occurs with the help of the hippocampus. Studies have shown that the hippocampus is involved in the consolidation of long term declarative memory, such as the facts and concepts you need to remember for a test. The linked video goes into more details of how this procedure works.
So how do we improve this process of memory consolidation. Well, with sleep. Declarative memory is repeatedly processed, similar to the process of revising over and over again, until gradually memories are redistributed for long-term storage in the cortex of the brain. The take home message is that skimping on sleep makes it less likely that you will retain all the knowledge and practice that you have crammed into the previous evening. For more information, see the linked TEDEd video – The benefits of a good night’s sleep.
http://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-benefits-of-a-good-night-s-sleep-shai-marcu#digdeeper
