In popular literature and culture, intellectuals are distinguished from other people in that, they are constantly sleep deprived when they write important thesis or work on inventions. However, in an article appearing on the Washington Post, Pope (2012) claims that on the contrary, students who spend too much time working and do not sleep enough are likely to perform poorly. The article discusses the trend where college students tend to sleep for only a few hours thinking that, by staying awake to cram, they can ace their exams. However, this notion is highly misleading since, without sufficient sleep, even the most brilliant of minds will lose their edge. In fact, the connection between memory and human learning is unequivocal, given that the ability to learn is directly proportional to one’s capacity to remember and reproduce what they learnt (Myers & Dewall, 2011).
However, there are numerous variables mediating the relationship between learning and memory and one of the most crucial ones is sleep. With references to the aforementioned article, this paper will discuss the underlying connections between learning, memory and sleep.
Many college students spend much of their time engaged in personal pursuits and generally not taking their studies very seriously. Weekends are spent partying or visiting with friends and on more than one occasion, students will engage in binge drinking sprees. As a result, they often end up remaining awake all night in coffee induced highs, poring through coursework and sometimes writing term papers from a scratch, yet they are due for submission the next day. When exams approach, many college students hardly get any sleep and this can even go on for as many as 48 hours. The article addresses various challenges facing students who fail to get enough sleep including the risk of depression, citing sleep deprivation as a leading cause of several forms of clinical depression.
Pope cites James Maas, who carried out research on students by monitoring their brain wave action when they were sleep deprived. According to him, the brain functions very slowly when one has not had enough sleep as compared to when they have had a good night’s rest. The majority of studies on sleep and memory, both formal and informal show that not getting sufficient sleep is counterproductive since one is unlikely to recall most of what they study when they have not slept enough. However, despite the existence of such proofs, students will still pull “all-nighters” on the eve of an important test, especially if they have not been studying or attending their classes regularly.
Ironically, getting enough rest on the night before the exam is more likely to boost performance than staying awake cramming concepts that they will only half remember as they do their exams (Pope, 2012). When one has slept the recommended 8 hours a night, they will be more productive during the day and will require less effort to understand what they study. On the other hand, when one spends the time they should be sleeping, studying, they end up requiring a lot of effort to grasp concepts, which they quickly forget.
There is a body of research and knowledge grounded on the assumption that sleep is critical for proper memory function. The human brain tries to process everything that one reads or comes across, but much of what enters the short-term memory is not converted into long-term memory. Additionally, even that which is in the long-term memory may be impossible to retrieve in time depending on the conditions under which this retrieval is being attempted (Myers & Dewall, 2011).
A primary course of retrieval failure is sleep deprivation since one is struggling to remain awake, which makes it difficult for the brain to function normally. Consequently, walking into the exam room with all the material needed for a paper and actually reproducing them are two very different things. Pope refers to some scenarios where coaches and teachers have taken up the initiative to encourage their students to sleep more and the results were remarkable. There were notable improvements in both academic and extra-curricular activities. After Deerfield academy implemented suggestions to increase their learners’ sleeping time, the school recorded its highest GPA and the number of students suffering from flu went down considerably.
Some of the solutions proposed in the article include flash naps, where students on campus are encouraged to take a random nap during the day in the hope that it will create awareness on the importance of sleeping regular hours. Ultimately, the biggest challenge facing college students when it comes to issues of sleep is the fact that not getting enough sleep is perceived as a positive and even macho thing (Pope, 2012). It is common to hear students bragging about how little sleep they get or need. In fact, sometimes it sounds like a competition to see who can survive with the least amount of sleep.
References
Myers G., & Dewall, N. (2011). Psychology in Everyday Life (3rd ed.). New York: Worth. Web.
Pope, J. (2012). Colleges wake up to notion that better sleep means better grades. Washington Times. Web.