Sleep - Anything But 'Down' Time

Sleep.  As children we may avoid it, certain that we might miss out on something, but as adults we crave the sleep that seems to be stolen by our commitments and responsibilities.  Why is sleep so important to our bodies, and what might it have to do with learning?  As I continue to work through John Medina's Brain Rules, I can tell you more than I knew before.

You may think that our body is "in neutral" when we are sleeping, yet science has demonstrated that, for the majority of the time that we are sleeping, that is not the case.  In fact, the only time you can observe a real resting period for the brain is in the deepest parts of what is called non-REM sleep, which takes up only about 20% of the total sleep cycle.  While your body may appear to be resting, the brain is not resting at all.

Now most people report that sleep is restorative, and note that if they don't get enough sleep, they don't think as well.  In the mid-1960s, a high school student did a science-fair project involving his not sleeping for 11 straight days and observing what happened.  To sum the experiment up, his brain began to malfunction - he became irritable, forgetful, nauseous, not surprisingly tired, and even suffered many symptoms similar to Alzheimer's disease.  All because of lack of sleep. 

One of the early discoveries in the area of sleep science was the fact that our bodies are locked in a daily warfare between the circadian arousal system (wakefulness) and the homeostatic sleep drive (you guessed it, sleepiness).  Internal and external forces help regulate the conflict, defining both the amount of sleep we need and the amount of sleep we get.  Scientific literature has labeled  people with different sleep rhythms as larks (early risers who are most productive around noon), owls (those who are most alert around 6 p.m.), and hummingbirds (the other 70% of the population who vary between those time ranges).  Though it is obvious that people's preferred sleep times can vary, just how much sleep an individual needs has not been concluded.  Sleep schedules are quite dynamic - changing with age, with gender, with pregnancy and with puberty. 

Most of us would agree that infants and young children need a nap to get them through the day, but science has found that short, regular naps can greatly benefit adults as well.  President Lyndon Johnson routinely closed his office door and took a 30-minute nap, which he said gave him the stamina to meet the demands of his position.  May seem odd to us, but consider that a "siesta" is part of many cultures.  Whether you actively pursue a nap each day or not, numerous studies have demonstrated that even a brief nap can improve performance by at least 30%.  Did you need a reason to take a break?

I think it's safe to say that most of us have heard the phrase "let's sleep on it."  What's behind the concept?  Can ordinary sleep benefit learning?  Yes!  Sleep has been shown to enhance tasks that involve visual texture discrimination, motor adaptations, and motor sequencing.  The learning that appears to be most sensitive to sleep improvement is that which involves learning a procedure, but consolidation of all learning and experiences in the day takes place the night after they occurred.

Lack of sleep hurts learning.  In fact, a highly successful student can be set up for an academic fall just by adjusting the number of hours he or she sleeps.  Cumulative losses of sleep are difficult to make up, and the physiological effects are staggering.  When sleep is restricted to 6 or less hours per night for just 5 nights, cognitive performance will match that of a person suffering from 48 hours of continual sleep deprivation.  When people become sleep-deprived, their body's ability to utilize the food they are consuming falls by about one-third - causing the body to crave more food, and adding weight gain and accelerated aging to the effects.

Does this information validate some of your innate understanding of sleep, or have you encountered information that contradicts your expectations? Are you a parent like me whose "owl" child seems to function in another dimension from the rest of the family?  How do you accommodate his individual rhythm and keep the whole family working together?  I chose the route of compromise - planning the activities that we would do together for late morning or afternoon, and allowing my "owl" to focus on his independent school work in the evening when he was most alert.  There were occasions where an external influence required him to be involved earlier than he preferred, but that was only when I had no control over the scheduling.  It took some adjustment for all concerned, yet the outcome was beneficial.

One thing is for certain ... I now have a greater appreciation for the importance of sleep, both for myself and my family.  I wish you pleasant dreams and effective learning!

Kelly

Remember to Repeat

Wouldn't it be a delight if our brains worked like a cassette tape recorder?  Do you remember those handy gadgets.  All you needed to do was put a blank cassette into the machine, press record and talk or sing into the microphone.  Then rewind and press play, and you heard a recording of what you had done.  While it might seem that it would be great to have it work that easily, our brains are, in fact, capable of so much more than the old cassette recorder.  The key is knowing how to maximize its potential.

That's what I'm hoping to share in this series of blog posts as I read John Medina's book, Brain Rules.  I can't say that I agree with his whole perspective - he works from an evolution-focused foundation - but many of his insights have been extremely enlightening.

We last talked about short-term memory and the fact that repeating information at regular intervals would enhance the encoding of that information.  Likewise, receiving that information in a variety of ways - through multiple senses - would provide more intricate and lasting encoding.  The key phrase for short-term memory was Repeat to Remember.

Next we will look at long-term memory, for which the key phrase is Remember to Repeat.

New memory traces - often referred to as working memory - are flexible, subject to amendment, and at great risk for extinction.  Converting this working memory into long-term storage is called consolidation.  Just like short-term memory, the fixative for long-term memory is repetition at regular intervals.  Thinking or talking about an event immediately after it happens greatly enhances memory.  Putting thoughts into your own words is another beneficial action.  Both are incorporated in the educational exercise of narration, where the student may read or listen to a passage or chapter in a book, and is then asked to recount the information in their own words.  Doing so right after the initial exposure is effective, and then repeating the information again - telling Dad at dinner, or sharing it with someone later in the day - will further fix the information in place.

There are auditory and visual components to memory, but when both can be incorporated as the information is first processed, the memory traces are more intricate and more easily retrieved at a later time.  The brain's retrieval systems seem to undergo a gradual shift from specific and detailed reproductions of information to more general and abstracted recall.  Regular re-exposure to the information will help to keep the memories more detailed.

Harvard phychology professor, Dan Schacter, tells his students, "If you have only one week to study for a final and only ten times when you can hit the subject, it is better to space out the ten repetitions during the week than squeeze them all together."  Late night, last minute cramming sessions are not effective.  Rather we learn here that it is better to revisit the information regularly between the time it is introduced and the time that retrieval is needed (test day) in order to ensure that retrieval will be as vivid as possible.

As teachers, we can seek to pace the information that we are giving to our students so that we are incorporating new information gradually and repeating it at timed intervals, rather than bombarding our students' brains with a constant flow of new information and minimal opportunities to revisit and explore deeper the concepts that were recently introduced.

For enhanced memory function ... Repeat to Remember, and Remember to Repeat.

Kelly

Repeat to Remember

One of the primary functions associated with the brain is memory, and this is a key function for students and educators. Knowing a little more about how the brain stores information may help you in your efforts to teach your children.

The brain has different types of memory systems that fall into two categories - those memories that involve conscious awareness and those that are voluntary.  Once you have learned how to ride a bike, recalling the skill at a later time does not generally require a conscious effort.  However, remembering a telephone number does require a conscious effort.  This type of memory is what we would call a declarative memory - involving something you declare - and it is the type about which researchers have learned the most.  Declarative memory involves encoding, storage, retrieval and even forgetting.

Most people believe that the brain is a lot like a recording device where learning is based on pushing the record button, and remember is similar to pushing the playback button.  But it really isn't that simple.  There are several types of encoding, which involve all of our senses, and their processing centers are scattered through the brain.  These include:

• Automatic encoding - which occurs unintentionally and is easily recalled because the memories seem bound in a cohesive, readily retrievable form
• Effortful processing - which requires conscious attention and deliberate effort, but the information does not tend to be bound together and requires a lot of repetition for effective retrieval
• Semantic encoding - which is focused on the definition of words
• Phonemic encoding - which involves the comparison between the sounds of words
• Structural encoding - which involves the visual inspection of shapes

What does this mean for your child's learning efforts?  Well, here are some guidelines for enhancing the encoding process, and thereby the memory retrieval.

First of all, the more elaborately we encode information at the moment of learning, the stronger the memory.  When information is presented in a way that incorporates multiple senses, that information will be encoded in various parts of the brain and produce a stronger opportunity for retrieval.  For example, when reading from a textbook, the student is receiving visual information for encoding.  Adding the student's voide reading the words - or at least the key sentences - out loud, provides auditory information for encoding, and taking notes or highlighting key information provides touch input that further expands the encoding.  Another example from the literature-based approach would involve reading a story that incorporates factual information within the context of a character's life and actions.  As the student connects emotionally with that character, the factual information becomes more personal in nature and is more elaborately encoded.  Ensuring that the student understands the meanings of words, and adding personal examples make the most of the brain's natural predilection for pattern matching.

Memories have different life spans.  Hermann Ebbinghaus has been credited with research that determined that people usually forget 90% of what they learn in a class within 30 days, with the majority of the forgetting occurring within the first few hours of class.  Isn't that encouraging?  However, he also found that simply repeating the information at timed intervals greatly increased the memory.  What does this mean to us as parent educators?  In order to help our children remember the information that are encoding, we must revisit that information regularly.  This can be done through discussion after material is read, by reviewing what has been learned about historical figures and events in our Book of Time, by making up songs or ditties with key information ... there are numerous ways to repeat information and extend the life of the memory.

Lastly, it is suggested that retrieval may be improved by replicating the conditions surrounding the initial encoding.  When a student has learned a particular portion of information in a special setting, returning to that setting will usually aid in the retrieval of the information.  You can recreate the sounds, the smells, the seating ... all to enhance your student's ability to retrieve information that has been encoded.

Repeat to remember, circle back to prior subject material and look at it again.  Your student will benefit greatly!

 Another post presenting information drawn from John Medina's Brain Rules.

Kelly

Attention!

Does it matter if we pay attention when learning?  You bet it does!  The more attention the brain pays to any stimulus, the more effectively the information will be encoded and retained.  Better attention always equals better learning in every academic category.

So do we use the military approach of yelling "attention!" whenever we want our homeschooled children to focus on what we have to say?  I really don't think that would be effective - we'd be hollering too much during the school day, and some of our children would be so distracted with the effort of sitting still that their brains would be anything but focused on what we are saying.  [By the way, the handsome soldier in the picture is my youngest son, demonstrating his good Army posture ... with the addition of a slight smile.]

The fourth rule that John Medina explains in his book, Brain Rules, addresses what attracts the brain's attention.

Memory - in everyday life, we use previous experience to predict where we should pay attention.  Even different environments create different expectations in the brain.  This could affect your child's willingness to pay attention if he is facing a subject that has felt defeating in the past.  Experiment with different settings for working in this subject, looking for an upbeat place and a new approach to give him success.

Interest - regardless of our culture, "interest" or "importance" is closely linked to our level of attention.  Marketing professionals actually believe that the reverse is also true - that unexpected attention getters can also spark interest.  Some commercials use unusual, unpredictable or distinctive features to harness our attention.  Likewise, you could use a story or picture to draw your children's attention and pique their interest before beginning a new lesson.

Emotion - emotionally arousing events tend to be better remembered than neutral events.  When the brain detects an emotionally charged event, it releases dopamine into the system which greatly aids memory and information processing.  This is one of the primary benefits of a literature-based approach to learning, where the story is written so as to immerse your child into the environment and emotion of the event, thereby fixing the detail into memory much more effectively than reading a dry narrative in a textbook.

We humans are terrific pattern matchers, constantly assessing our environment for similarities.  Our memory is enhanced by creating associations between concepts.  When you are introducing a new concept in Math, try showing your child how this concept can be utilized in real life before you explain how to do it.  This may seem like approaching it backward - most Math lessons would teach the concept and then show how to apply it - but you may find that your child's attention will be more focused and their grasp of the concept itself more firm if you use this approach.  He may even take the problem solving further than you had demonstrated, which makes the lesson all the more effective.

There's more to this topic of attention that I will share in my next post ...

Kelly

Wired (and Re-wired) to Learn

What does a nerve cell look like? A fried egg provides a great visual of a cell, but needs some modification to look like a nerve cell.  If you're not afraid of a little clean up, try this with your children – put it on the table and smash it with the palm of your hand, splattering it across the table. You should have a many-pointed star. Now take one of the points and stretch it out away from the “body” of the egg, then take your thumb and squish the farthest region of the point you just stretched. You now have a visual representation of a nerve cell, or neuron – two smashed stars connected by a long, thin line. The original smashed piece represents the nerve’s cell body, and the star points are dendrites, while the stretched out region is called an axon, and the starburst at the furthest end is the axon terminal.  Talk about an effective demo, huh?  I can't take credit for this one - it's adapted from John Medina's Brain Rules, from which I also quote below.

Now let's put that neuron into perspective in the brain itself.  You can visualize the real world of two neurons interacting by "thinking of two trees uprooted by giant hands, turned 90 degrees so the roots face each other, and then jammed together. Usually, thousands of neurons are jammed up against one another, with their branches forming connections in a nearly incomprehensible mass of branching confusion.”

“Occasionally, the end of one neuron swells up, greatly increasing in diameter. The terminal ends of the other neurons split down the middle like a forked tongue creating two connections where there was only one. Electricity crackles through these moving neurons at blinding speed…with clouds of neurotransmitters filling spaces between the neuron trunks.” The human brain is learning!

“As neurons learn, they swell, sway, and split. They break connections in one spot, glide over to a nearby region and form connections with their new neighbors. Many stay put, simply strengthening their electrical connections with each other, increasing the efficiency of information transfer.” The brain is constantly learning, so the brain is constantly rewiring itself.

The human brain is only partially constructed at birth, with the majority of construction being finished by the mid-20s and fine-tuning carried on well into your 40s. When babies are born, their brains have about the same number of connections as adults have; but by the time they are 3 years old, the connections in specific regions of their brains have doubled or tripled. It doesn’t last though, as the brain will actually trim back a lot of this expansion and return to adult numbers by the age of 8. Then the process starts again at puberty with connections settling down to adult numbers in the late teens. Though the larger pathways in the brain – the neural equivalents of interstate freeways and state highways - are fairly consistent, individual patterns are evident when you get to the smaller routes – the brain’s equivalent of residential streets and dirt roads. “Whether examining toddlers or teenagers, different regions in different children develop at different rates.”

Here’s the educational application …

Our current educational system, particularly the classroom model, is based on a series of expectations that certain learning goals should be achieved by a certain age. But does everyone’s brain follow that one pattern? Students of the same age show a great deal of intellectual variability. About 10% of students do not have brains sufficiently wired to read at the age at which we expect them to read. And this is not the only subject area for which the brain’s readiness can vary.

Rather than fix your expectations on any particular scope and sequence, present the opportunities and observe your child. In the homeschooling setting it is much easier to vary your approaches and your timing for learning opportunities. If your child does not appear to grasp a concept quickly, consider whether you may be introducing it too early for that child. Pull back and reinforce what they have grasped, or try a different approach for introducing the concept. Incorporate as many of your child’s senses – seeing, smelling, hearing, touching and even tasting – in their learning environment and watch the outer evidence of the brain’s rewiring in action.  What an incredible adventure you are sharing with your child!

Kelly

Exercise Boosts Brain Power

At the encouragement of a friend, I am reading the book, Brain Rules, by John Medina. Just a couple chapters into the book I have encountered information that I simply must share, and this blog seems to be the best way to do so. I feel a series of posts coming on as I mine the valuable nuggets of this book.


Brain Rule #1 – Exercise Boosts Brain Power

We’ve heard a lot about the benefits of exercise for our bodies, but I hadn’t so clearly encountered its benefits for brain power until now. My post titled "Move and Learn" in May addressed the benefit of movement and academics, but this was mostly from the learning style perspective. I’m now armed with even more information regarding the benefits of exercise – or movement – for our brain.

A good bit of research has been done to compare the effects of sedentary and active lifestyles. Exercise can result in sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance compared with those who are sedentary. Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in tests that measure long-term memory, reasoning, attention, and problem-solving. That’s fine, you may be thinking, but that’s not been our habit up to now. Hang on though, all is not lost. When normally sedentary people are enrolled in an aerobic exercise program, all kinds of mental abilities begin to come back online for young or old. In a recent study, children began a program of jogging for 30 minutes 2-3 times a week. After 12 weeks, their cognitive performance had improved significantly compared with pre-jogging levels.

Dr Antronette Yancey’s studies found that exercise improves children. Physically fit children identify visual stimuli much faster than sedentary ones and appear to concentrate better. Brain-activation studies show that children and adolescents who are fit allocate more cognitive resources to a task and do so for longer periods of time.

“Kids pay better attention to their subjects when they’ve been active,” Yancey says. “Kids are less likely to be disruptive in terms of their classroom behavior when they’re active. Kids feel better about themselves, have higher self-esteem, less depression, less anxiety. All of those things can impair academic performance and attentiveness.”

Why exercise works so well on the brain – a brief physiology lesson …

When we eat, the body uses teeth, stomach acid and the intestines to tear the food apart and reconfigure it for absorption. Much of our food is turned into glucose, one of the body’s favorite energy resources, and absorbed into the bloodstream via the small intestines. It is then carried to the body’s cells where cellular chemicals tear apart the molecular structure of glucose to extract its energy. Such fierce activity generates a fair amount of toxic waste, primarily in the form of excess electrons, better known as free radicals. If not quickly corralled, they will wreck havoc on the innards of a cell and thus the body. The main function of oxygen in your body is to act like an efficient electron-absorbing sponge. At the same time the blood is delivering foodstuffs to your tissues, it also carries these oxygen sponges which absorb the electrons and transform them into carbon dioxide which is carried back to the lungs for expulsion from the body. The oxygen-rich air you breathe keeps the food you eat from killing you.

Blood acts as both wait staff and haz-mat team, and any tissue without enough blood supply is going to both starve and be poisoned – including your brain. Though only representing about 2% of the body’s total weight, our brain utilizes 20% of the body’s total energy resources. Improving the blood’s delivery system can improve both the brain’s energy supply and waste removal. Exercise does not provide the oxygen and food – it provides greater access to the oxygen and food. When you exercise, you increase blood flow across tissues of your body. As the flow improves, the body makes new blood vessels, which penetrate deeper and deeper into the tissues of the body. The more you exercise, the more tissues you can feed and the more toxic waste you can remove.

Imaging studies have shown that exercise literally increases blood volume in a region of the brain called the dentate gyrus - a vital constituent of the hippocampus, a region deeply involved in memory formation. Early studies also indicate that exercise also stimulates one of the brain’s most powerful growth factors, BDNF, which exerts a fertilizer-like growth effect on certain neurons in the brain. This protein keeps existing neurons young and healthy, and encourages the formation of new cells in the brain.

After presenting this fascinating lesson on brain physiology, Dr. Medina proposes that classrooms integrate more movement, and that Phys Ed programs be increased rather than eliminated. Might be a little harder to sell this in a large school district, but it wouldn’t be as hard to integrate the idea of exercise/movement in our homeschool environment. Maybe you don’t relish the thought of jogging, but you could add some basic calisthenics – jumping jacks, sit ups, running the stairs or around the house, etc. – to get the blood pumping in your home at regular intervals in the day. I daresay that you will discover improvements in both academics and mood. Try it out!

Kelly

The Top 10 Reasons We Homeschool Our Children

As promised, I will finish the list I started with my last post ...

6.  To build intimate and meaningful relationships with your children in order to show them how much you love them.  I learned early on in my homeschooling adventure than one of the side-effects of classroom socialization is that my children thought they needed to spend most of their time with other children their own age.  Little brother just wasn't a 'cool' playmate, and hanging out with mom wasn't ideal either.  But I saw this attitude change as we discovered new aspects of our relationships and we began to enjoy each other's company.  More time together also made it easier to be a student of my children - to observe them and discover their strengths and weaknesses, their likes and dislikes - which made my parenting more effective.

7. To share with your children the common, everyday joys of life and be there when they need you most.  I was there when my younger boys learned to read, I was there when they saw and grasped a new concept in Math or Science - and it was a delight!  I was also there when life handed them disappointments, and I could encourage them to keep seeking, to keep knocking on the door.

8.  To be your children's mentor, spiritual leader, role model, friend, and teacher.  A lot of hats to wear, I know.  Yet consider how hard it would be to fill these roles for your child if you weren't with them throughout the day - or if you were having to undo more negative accumulation from classroom and peer experiences.

9.  To protect your children from the negative influences they may encounter outside the home.  Now don't get me wrong ... I'm not saying to place your children in a cuccoon that completely shields them.  We didn't completely keep them away from negative influence, but were better able to protect them by choosing the venues and balancing their exposure with our guidance and affirmation.  As they grew older, we allowed them greater choice, while providing the sounding board for discussions of what they experienced and the appropriate response to it.

10.  To instill in your children a life-long love for learning and to show them that learning is not boring, but exciting.  This love for learning is, in my opinion, the result of our efforts in #3 - meeting your child's unique needs.  When you help your child identify his learning style, and provide the tools for him to be successful, then your child's innate curiosity and desire to learn isn't squelched, but is rather fueled for the future.

You've made a good choice!  The road won't be easy, and there will be days that you question your decision, but look again at the reasons for the path you have chosen, and be encouraged.

Kelly