FALL 2010 FINALS GUIDE
7
STUDYING
Hit the sack after a long night in the stacks
Experts say your brain needs sleep to learn
Staying up all night to study may do more harm than good. Experts say the brain needs at least six hours of sleep to retain new information.
Jerry Wang/KANSAN
BY GEOFFREY CALVERT editor@kansan.com
Many college students prepare for Finals Week by spending hours in a campus library frantically cramming in one last attempt to boost, salvage or maintain a grade. While students may feel it is tradition to stay up all night studying for finals, depriving oneself of sleep to study more is not a beneficial practice.
"Benefits of a good night's rest include alertness, being cognitively sharp, as well as the ability to concentrate, remember, make critical and creative decisions and be productive," said Jenny McKee, Health Educator at the Wellness Resource Center, via e-mail. "All of these qualities are important for test taking. If an individual has had a full night's sleep they will be much more likely to be able to perform optimally on their test."
Collin Stephens, a sophomore from Overland Park, said that although he tends to study in the afternoon, he pulled three all-nighters last year when studying for finals. He noted the effects that losing sleep had on his body.
"It hurt my sleep pattern and energy level," Stephens said, "But it didn't kill me. I can survive pulling all-nighters."
By sticking to a set sleeping schedule students allow their memory to better retain information the student has studied even though it means sacrificing late night study hours. The later into the night that a student studies, however, the less information the brain digests. According to McKee, staying up to cram for a test would be counterproductive.
"It would not work because our memory of newly learned stuff improves only after sleeping at least six hours. The brain needs time to file new information and skills away in the proper slots so that it can be retrieved later," McKee said. "Without enough sleep to do all this 'filing', the new information does not get properly encoded into the brain's memory circuits."
Stephens took a different perspective from McKee, however.
"For me, it's different studying all night than it is staying up to write a paper," he said.
Students who stay up late to study can improve their chances of retaining information by napping during the day, but only if
they dream.
In a study conducted by Robert Stickgold, director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, 99 college students were asked to memorize an intricate maze. Stickgold inserted the students into a virtual representation of the maze, and the students were instructed to navigate through the virtual maze. After this, half of the students took a 90-minute nap, while the other participants were kept awake. Five hours later, all the participants were given the maze again. The students who had napped navigated the maze better than the students who stayed awake, and the nappers who dreamt fared about ten times better than those who did not dream.
"When you dream, your brain is trying to look at connections that you might not think of or notice when awake," Stickgold wrote in the study. Applying this to studying, by napping after studying during the day, your mind stays refreshed and is not taxed by late night studying, and it works to process information on a deeper level than when one is awake.
- Edited by Sarah Kelly
"The sleeping brain seems to be processing information on one level, but on a higher level it helps evolve your memory network." Michael Breus, the clinical director of Arrowhead Health's sleep division, told CNN Health.
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MONDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2010
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN