Is There Good Evidence for Learning While Sleeping - Term Paper Example

Is there good evidence for learning while sleeping? Affiliation Is there good evidence for learning while sleeping? Sleep is a vital aspect of every individual’s life, and it is said that a normal person should sleep at least for eight hours. Conversely many people ignore these facts not understanding the benefits that are associated with a good night sleep. Evidence shows that a person’s brain works actively while they are sleeping in order to create pathways for areas such as memories, learning, and new insights. According to the Society for Neuroscience report that was delivered in Washington D.C. it was held that during sleep the brain produces chemicals that are very imperative to the memory, which in turn relieves the events that an individual wants to remember. This essay will examine the evidence that has been put across in relation to learning and sleep. The study to establish the relationship between sleep and learning began a long time ago in order to understand how a healthy sleep would be beneficial. Alois Benjamin Saliger in 1927 invented the Psycho-phone that was used for sleep learning. He indicated “It has been proven that natural sleep is identical with hypnotic sleep and that during natural sleep the unconscious mind is most receptive to suggestion (Saliger).” However, scientist began to dispute this findings since the Electroencephalography studies that were conducted by William H. Emmons and Charles W. Simmons in 1956. The scientists concluded that acquiring education while a person was sleeping was impractical and impossible. The researchers indicated that unless wave activity occurred simultaneously with when the stimulus material is given the material cannot be recalled by the subject after he or she has woken up. This is because alpha activity during naps indicates that the participant is about to wake up; therefore, the researchers were of the view that learning occurs when a person is awake (Stickgold & Walker, 2009). This conclusion was disputed by research that was conducted by Weizmann Institute of Science in 2012. The research concluded that classical conditioning can happen during sleeping through the use of odor recognition. Ariz et al. 2012, stated “During sleep, humans can strengthen previously acquired memories, but whether they can acquire new information remains unknown. The nonverbal nature of the olfactory sniff response, in which pleasant odors drive stronger sniffs, and unpleasant orders drive weaker sniffs, allowed us to test learning in humans during sleep.” According to Karim Benchenane from the National Center for Scientific Research, while people are sleeping it is the time old memories are modified, and new ones are formed. Additionally, a sleep researcher at the Northwestern University indicated “one of the most profound effects of a night of sleep is the improvement in our ability to remember things.” Further evidence indicates that sleep influences the consolidation of recent memory traces. The underlying hypothesis in relation to sleep and memory or learning posits that the data that is acquired during wakefulness is actively altered, strengthened and restructured during sleep (Lee-Chiong, 2006). This is the reason sleep deprived people cannot focus their attention optimally making them not to learn efficiently. This shows that sleep has a role of amalgamation of memory, which is very imperative in the learning of new information. The latest study that was used to demonstrate the importance of sleep on the learning process was conducted by Northwestern University. In this study, the researchers gave people a task to learn how to separate different musical melodies through the use of visual symbols. After learning how to play the two tunes, the participants then procured a 90-minute sleep. While the participants were sleeping, the scientists played only one of the dualistic melodies. Additionally, they monitored the brain acting during the time the participants were sleeping. This was because they wanted to introduce the music during the slow-wave sleep (Carlson, 2010). At this stage of sleep, the individuals were deeply asleep in the sense that, they were in a restorative stage of sleep that is usually connected with the consolidation and creation of memory. The researchers found that when the participants were asked to repeat the melodies the one they had heard while they were asleep was the one they could replay with so much accuracy. Additionally, the researchers found that the EEG measurements of brain activity during slow-wave sleep related to the degree of improvement in memory. This was an illustration that the researcher may have managed to measure the accurate brain activity that was aiding in strengthening memory. The scientists are hard at work to find the link between sleep and the ability of individuals to learn and to also transfer information that people learn into long-term memories. It has been established that sleep converts new learning into established memories (Cell Press, 2004). When a study was conducted on students, it was established that students who sleep after memorizing two sets of word pairs have a better chance of recalling that information than those who did not sleep for several hours. Although the appropriate mechanism has not yet been found it has been established that memory and learning are defined in relation to three roles. First, there is the acquisition, which refers to the introduction of novel information into the brain. Secondly, there is consolidation, which represents the process through, which the memory of an individual becomes stable. Lastly, there is a recall which is the ability of the person to access data whether unconsciously or consciously after it has been kept by the brain (Plaford, 2009). Acquisition and recall usually occur during wakefulness, but according to the research done in sleep it is suggested that memory consolidation only occurs during sleep via the consolidation of the neural networks that form the human memory. There is no agreed consensus about the way sleep makes the process of consolidation possible, but many researchers state that specific characteristics of the brainwaves during the diverse stages of sleep are linked to the formation of particular kinds of memory. Apart from research that has been done extensively there are various theories that have been established in relation to learning and sleep in humans. The studies conducted have illustrated that healthy sleep results in a significant learning dependent performance boost. This is to say that healthy sleep must include the appropriate proportion and sequence of REM and NREM phases, which play diverse roles in memory consolidation –optimization process. NREM sleep consists of stages one to four where movement can be observed. REM is characterized by the lack of muscle movements. According to Physiological studies it has been established that aside from occasional twitch a person becomes paralyzed during the REM sleep. The researchers have studied the function of sleep in memory and learning formation in two diverse ways. First, the researchers looked at the diverse stages of sleep, as well as, their changes in their time in regards to learning a range of new responsibilities. The second tactic looks at the effects of sleep deprivation on learning, which can be no sleep allowed, particle sleep of selective sleep. Declarative Memory is the initial sleep and memory study that was conducted. This is the awareness of fact-based data or the information that we know. In one research study that was conducted the individuals involved in a rigorous language sequence were seen to have an upsurge in REM sleep or rapid eye movement. During REM, dreaming occurs rapidly. Scientist theorized that REM sleep played a very important role in the attainment of learned material. Furthermore, studies have proposed that REM sleep appears to be involved in declarative memory procedures in case the data is complex and emotionally exciting, but not in cases where the data is emotionally neutral and simple. Today the researchers hypothesize that slow-wave sleep is deep, restorative sleep, and it plays an imperative function in declarative memory by dispensation and consolidating freshly retrieved information. Moreover, research has also put emphasis on sleep and the role it has in procedural memory that is the remembrance of how to do something. However, it is clear that REM sleep plays a serious role in the merging of procedural memory. In addition, other facets of sleep also have an impact on the motor learning because it seems to be contingent on the amount of lighter phases of sleep. Visual learning, on the other hand, depends on the timing and the amount of both deep, REM and Slow-wave sleep. Various impacts have been established in relation to sleep deprivation where lack of sufficient sleep has diverse impacts on the learning process. For example, when a person is sleep deprived their focus, vigilance and attention drifts making it difficult to receive information. In that without adequate rest and sleep over-worked neurons cannot work to coordinate information appropriately (Organisation, E. C.-D & Innovation, 2007). For that reason, people lose the capability to access formerly learned information. Additionally, an individual interpretation of information may be affected because such individuals lose their capability to make sound judgments because they did not correctly assesses the condition, plan appropriately and choose the right behavior making their judgment to become impaired. Sleep deprivation and Low-quality sleep also have a negative impact on mood, which consequently affects learning. This is because alterations in moods affect people’s capacity to obtain new information. This indicates that having a good night sleep is very important in ensuring that people learn and improve on the information they have acquired during the day. Studies at Trent University Canada and Harvard Medical School have conducted various experiments to establish the benefits of sleep in school going children, their parents and teachers in relation to learning. The students in these experiments go through a series of tests where they sleep for numerous lengths of time to establish how sleep affects their learning patterns. The studies concluded that the students brains merges and practices what is knowledgeable during the day after the scholars have gone to sleep. The Study further established that parents understood intuitively that sleep helped their children in learning, but few of them knew that learning continued to take place even after the children went to sleep. Dr. Robert Stickgold of Harvard University Medical School used succession tests concerning visual tasks where he concluded that the brain appears to need a lot of slow-wave nap and Rapid Eye Movement. He further indicated that the reason the brain requires these types of sleep is solely because definite brain chemicals plummet through the first portion of the night; hence, the information flows out if the hippocampus into the cortex. Later the brain distributes such information into appropriate categories and networks. When the information gets to the brain proteins, reinforce the links among the nerve cells; thus, consolidating the new skills that have been learned previously. Then during the REM, the mind re-enacts the instructions from the previous day and coagulates the novel made links through memory banks. This study shows that learning a novel task will be prominently be helped by having a good night sleep as having a good night sleep gives the individual the ability to remember. The evidence given Harvard studies have been said to be the most credible data ever poised because the researchers focused on a specific function of the brain that is associated with learning and sleep. However, a study conducted in 2001 challenged this conclusion where Jerome N Siegel indicated that the evidence that linked between learning and REM sleep were inconsistent and contradictory. He further pointed out towards the inconsistency in results from animals and human studies. He argued that those humans who do not experience REM sleep as a result of pharmacological reasons and brain injuries do not indicate any memory problems. Siegel concluded by indicating that though he does not agree with the existing literature because it does not point out to the link between memory and REM sleep consolidation,” just as nutritional status, ambient temperature, level of stress, blood oxygenation and other variable clearly affect the ability to learn, adequate sleep is vital to optimal performance in learning tasks (Siegel).” In my opinion, I think there is adequate evidence to show that sleep is associated with learning. This is because when a person has a healthy sleep their ability to function and concentrate improves meaning that with an adequate amount of sleep people can become better in making the appropriate judgments. Additionally, it is clear that sleep deprivation makes people weak in terms of thinking because they did not get adequate sleep. In addition, they tend to become forgetful because they are bombarded with so much information and yet their minds are too tired to gain anything making it impossible for them to learn anything at the end of the day. For that reason, it is clear that sleep is associated with learning and having a good memory. In conclusion, learning good sleeping habits is very important, especially for students because it can aid them in memory and learning, as well as, understanding better what they have learned in class. Therefore, it is clear that there is adequate evidence to support the notion that people can acquire knowledge through sleeping. Adequate sleep means that an individual will have a good memory making it easier for them to prepare for exams. Apart from learning a good night sleep helps in blood circulation, which reduces chances of high blood pressure. For that reason, people should not deprive themselves sleep. References Arzi, A.; Shedlesky, L.; Ben-Shaul, M.; Nasser, K.; Oksenberg, A.; Hairston, I. S.; Sobel, N. (2012). "Humans can learn new information during sleep". Nature Neuroscience 15 (10): 1460–1465. doi:10.1038/nn.3193. PMID 22922782 Carlson, N. R.(2010). Physiology of Behavior, 11th Edition. New York: Allyn & Bacon Cell Press. (2004, November 1). Evidence That Learning Is Consolidated During Sleep. ScienceDaily. Retrieved February 14, 2015 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/10/041030184646.htm Ellenbogen JM, Payne JD, Stickgold R. The role of sleep in declarative memory consolidation: passive, permissive, active or none? Curr Opin Neurobiol. 2006 Dec;16(6):716-22. Epub 2006 Nov 7 Lee-Chiong, T. L. (2006). Sleep: A comprehensive handbook. Hoboken, N.J: Wiley-Liss. Organisation, . E. C.-D., & Innovation, C. E. R. (2007). Understanding the Brain: The Birth of a Learning Science. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Payne, J. D., Tucker, M. A., Ellenbogen, J. M., Wamsley, E. J., Walker, M. P., Schacter, D. L., & Stickgold, R. (2012). Memory for semantically related and unrelated declarative information: The benefit of sleep, the cost of wake. Plos ONE, 7(3), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0033079 Plaford, G. R. (2009). Sleep and learning: The magic that makes us healthy and smart. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Education. Stickgold, R. & Walker, M.P. (2004). Sleep-dependent learning and memory consolidation. Neuron, 44, 121-133. Stickgold, R., & Walker, M. P. (2009). The neuroscience of sleep. Amsterdam: Academic Press/Elsevier. Read More