Read Text II for the question:
TEXT II
It’s hard to overstate the benefits of a night’s rest
for human memory, and neuroscientists are just
beginning to understand why.
Jakke Tamminen has plenty of students who
do that very studenty thing of staying up all night right
before an exam, in the hope of stuffing in as much
knowledge as they can. But “that’s the worst thing
you can do”, the psychology lecturer at the UK’s
Royal Holloway University warns them.
He should know. Tamminen is an expert on
how sleep affects memory, specifically the recall
needed for language. Sleep learning – another idea
beloved of students, in the hope that, say, playing
a language-learning recording during sleep would
imprint itself into the brain subliminally and they’d
wake up speaking Latin – is a myth. But sleep itself
is essential for embedding knowledge in the brain,
and the research of Tamminen and others shows us
why that is.
In Tamminen’s ongoing research project,
participants learn new vocabulary, then stay awake
all night.
Tamminen compares their memory of those
words after a few nights, and then after a week.
Even after several nights of recovery sleep, there is a
substantial difference in how quickly they recall those
words compared to the control group of participants
who didn’t face sleep deprivation. “Sleep is really
a central part of learning,” he says. “Even though
you’re not studying when you sleep, your brain is still
studying. It’s almost like it’s working on your behalf.
You can’t really get the full impact of the time you put
into your studies unless you sleep.”
[…]
But more critical to Tamminen’s current
research – and to sleep’s role in language
development more generally – is a non-REM phase
of deep sleep known as slow-wave sleep (SWS).
SWS is important for forming and retaining memories,
whether of vocabulary, grammar, or other knowledge.
The interaction of different parts of the brain is key
here. During SWS, the hippocampus, which is good
at quick learning, is in constant communication with
the neocortex, to consolidate it for long term recall.
So the hippocampus might initially encode
a new word learned earlier that day, but to truly
consolidate that knowledge – spotting patterns and
finding connections with other ideas that allow for
creative problem-solving – the neocortical system
needs to get involved.
This information expressway between the
hippocampus and the neocortex is populated by
sleep spindles – spikes in brain activity that are no
more than three seconds long.
“Sleep spindles are somehow associated with
linking new information with existing information,”
Tamminen says. And the data from his research
participants suggests that people with more sleep
spindles have more consolidation of the words they
have learned.
[…]
Children have more slow-wave sleep than
adults – which may be one factor explaining how
quickly kids learn, in both language and other areas. The child sleep lab at Germany’s University
of Tuebingen investigates the role of sleep in
consolidating children’s memory. Monitoring what
happens in children’s brains during sleep, and
how much information they retain before and after
sleep, shows that sleep helps with accessing implicit
knowledge (procedural memory) and making it
explicit (declarative memory).
“The effects are stronger in early childhood
because the brain is developing,” says Dominique
Petit, the coordinator of the Canadian Sleep and
Circadian Network, who has also explored the
circadian rhythm in children. In practical terms, this
means that “children need to sleep during the day to
remember everything that they have to learn”.
“Daytime naps in young children have
been shown to be really important for vocabulary
growth, generalization of the meaning of words and
abstraction in language learning,” she says. “Sleep
continues to be important for memory and learning
throughout the lifetime, though.”
[…]
Not only does sleep help with accessing this
information, it also changes the way this information
is accessed. This makes brains more flexible at
retrieving information (or able to access it in more
ways).
But it also makes them better at extracting
the most significant parts of it.
“It’s actually an active process of strengthening
and changing the memory trace,” Zinke says.
“Memory gets transferred in a way that the most
important information (the gist) is remembered.”
Clearly, for children as well as adults,
prolonged sleep isn’t a sign of laziness in a language
learner. It’s critical for our brains’ connections and
our bodies’ rhythms.
Available at: https://www.bbc.com/future/
article/20180815-why-sleep-should-be-everystudents-priority (adapted)