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

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