If you are caught dozing off in class by your teacher, there is now an excuse for you to justify yourself. A recent study discovered that sleeping for a while after learning new stuff is the best way for one to remember it.
The study had 207 students as participants who spent a minimum of six hours sleeping every night. They were tasked to study declarative, semantically related or unrelated word pairs at either 9 in the morning or evening. After which, they went back for testing half an hour, 12 hours or a day later.
In the 12-hour category, those who had a night's rest before being examined (learnt at 9pm, tested at 9am) were better at memorization compared to those who spent the time awake between their learning and test periods.
As for the 24-hour retest where all participants had received an entire night of sleep and spent a whole day in awake mode, results hardly differ from its 12-hour counterpart as participants who slept shortly before the test fared much better than those who did not catch a wink.
Sleeping after learning a new thing is advantageous to the brain as it makes us try to recall the knowledge which we just gained. It is sort of a rehearsal in your mind when your brain tries to remember the new thing you learned while you are asleep.
There you go, a perfect excuse for students to take a nap if the teacher and teaching gets too boring. That is provided if they can produce the expected results.
No comments:
Post a Comment