Insomnia Cures Are Good For Learning Too!
March 27, 2010 by admin
Filed under Insomnia Treatment
If you sleep terribly you know you do not function well the day after. Look at children when they do not sleep enough – they certainly get “cranky”!
It is obvious in children who sleep too small – they are temperamental and irritable. As you grow older you can partly overcome this.
But, there is another aspect which is often overlooked when sleep is discussed. Our ability to learn new things is intimately interwoven with sleep. The way learning is processed in the brain has been investigated using MRI scans. It seems to work like this – during the day you learn new facts and get thoughts, as well as buy new skills, that are place into long-term memory when you sleep.
Also academic and practical tasks are learnt differently. Learning to walk or climb a tree are practical tasks. It appears this kind of learning is consolidated during REM sleep.
Young children do a lot of practical learning – ever seen a small child learning to walk – which clarifies why young children have more REM sleep. Now you know why small children nap a lot. Growing older means you progress to more “academic” learning – just consider school courses.
Learning of this kind seems to be embedded mainly in slow wave sleep. It is well established – you have certainly experienced this as well – indicating that you are more likely to remember if you “sleep on it”. Adding insult to injury, you will be less clever the less you sleep!
A very excellent example is when soldiers have to stay awake. Sleeplessness does not improve their choice making faculty, rather the opposite.
Add here the ages-ancient knowledge that very often creative thinking improves when you ponder a problem, setting out all the aspects you can reckon of – and then forget about it!
In one of the best known instances of this subconscious problem solving the riddle the benzene molecule was untangled.
A German scientist – Friedrich Kekule – was thinking of what the benzene molecule looked like. At the time he could not reckon of a way the 12 atoms could be joined. This was in 1865.
Whilst he was pondering the problem he dozed off in front of the fire, and in his sleep he saw two serpents catching each other?s tails.
When he woke up he saw the structure in his mind – the carbon atoms were joined in a ring ,and the hydrogen atoms were “dangling” from the carbon atoms. At the time this was completely new!
What happened? Friedrich Kekule could not consciously place the facts together. When he place all of the data in his subconscious – like entering them in a computer program – his mental “computer” started to work the problem through.
Maybe you won’t have moments as crucial as Kekule, but you will certainly be more creative if you sleep better!
Insomnia cures are legion. But what works for me might not work for you – therefore you need my newsletter! Having found cures for insomnia for me I can tell you about all the other methods as well, so you don’t have to do all the research.
