The Huffington Post by Michael J.Breus
Wednesday, June 06, 2012
Want to maximize your learning capacity? Get some sleep. That’s the takeaway from a study that examined the influence of sleep and time of day on learning and memory. This latest research is another piece of compelling evidence that sleeping helps to strengthen our ability to learn new things, and to convert new learning into longer-term memories.
In this study, 207 students who slept regularly for at least six hours per night were assigned to learn two different sets of word pairs. One set of word pairs were semantically related; the other pairs were made up of unrelated words. The difference is important. The type of learning involved in recalling unrelated word pairs is different than for pairs that are related, and involves forming new associations, essentially creating a relationship in the mind for these words that are otherwise unrelated.