The Role of Sleep in Learning #Learning #Memory #Sleep A clea | Alter Ego

The Role of Sleep in Learning
#Learning #Memory #Sleep

A clear illustration of developmental mechanisms involves the changing role of sleep in promoting learning and generalization. Infants spend a great deal of their lives sleeping; for example, 6-month-olds average 14–15 hours of sleep per day. This prolonged sleep serves an important function in promoting learning. However, the type of learning that it promotes changes with the maturation of the hippocampus, a brain structure that is particularly important for learning and remembering.

During the first 18 months following birth, sleep appears to promote learning of general, frequently encountered patterns, but not learning of the specifics of material only presented once or twice. In contrast, after age 24 months, children tend to show the opposite pattern: when tested shortly after napping, they often better remember the specifics of what they learned than peers who did not nap during that period; but their memory for general patterns is no better than those of peers who did not nap.

In 2014, Werchan and Gómez described mechanisms that could underlie this change from infancy to the preschool period. Their explanation was based on a major theory of memory, called Active Systems Consolidation Theory, which posits that two interconnected brain areas, the hippocampus and the cortex, simultaneously encode new information during learning. The hippocampus can learn details of new information after one or two experiences; the cortex produces abstraction of general patterns over many experiences. The two brain areas are strongly interconnected, and the theory posits that in older children and adults, hippocampal memories are replayed during sleep, which allows opportunities for the cortex to extract general patterns from the specific memories stored in the hippocampus. The mechanism works in the opposite direction as well; learning general patterns improves the retention of details of new experiences of the same type.

We can safely say that sleep is not, as many think, a waste of time but a tool to greater learning and memory capabilities. There is, now, a substantial body of research suggesting a great number of sleep benefits to learning and retention in humans. Even short naps, 15-30 min, can recharge your brain for more learning.