clair073

Got kids or grandkids in school? Odds are they are not getting enough sleep, and it is hurting their learning and grades. This is a special problem for older adolescents. At this age, the biological clock shifts and makes them stay up too late if they need to get up at 6-7 A.M. to get ready for school. Kids this age need about 9 hours of sleep a night. So what is the relationship to learning? Two things: 1. When students are drowsy during class, they can't focus attention and will not encode new information effectively. Sometimes they even fall asleep in class, which means they are not encoding anything. 2. Sleep provides an uninterrupted mental environment in which the brain rehearses the events of that day. As documented in dozens of peer-reviewed research reports, this rehearsal promotes consolidation of fragile temporary memory into more permanent form. Now, two new studies reveal what happens during sleep to accomplish this consolidation task. Just as a computer writes to a ha...

Do you feel embarrassed because you use such memory aids as sticky notes, calendars, shopping lists, designated places for personal items, or other shortcuts to help you remember? If so, don’t feel bad. Some recent research suggests that saving key information in specific ways can be a good idea. Not only do reminder notes, computer files, and other means of information storage make information available for later access, they also can apparently lighten cognitive load and make it easier to remember new information. Recent experiments tested the hypothesis that saving information is a form of off-loading cognitive workload that frees the brain to be more effective at attending and remembering new information. These experiments by a team at the University of California, Santa Cruz, were inspired by prior work of others revealing that information was not remembered as well if it were saved as a computer file, presumably because participants knew they could look it up later. This finding ...