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Authors: Ira Flatow
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the next day.”
And what’s going on in your brain that you need this sleep to cement that practice? Stickgold took his students into his sleep lab to find out.
“We got very surprising results.”
What he found is that when you go through a night of sleep you go through a 90-minute sleep cycle. You go down into deep sleep and then come out of it into REM sleep, where you do most of your intense dreaming. This cycle gets repeated all night.
“And what we discovered is that to show improvement on the next day, you need good slow-wave—or deep—sleep in the first couple of hours of the night. And you need REM sleep, but only after six hours. And that’s probably why those students who got less than six hours didn’t show improvement.
“So you need two things to happen at night. You need to have something happen while you’re in deep sleep, earlier in the night. There’s three or four hours that have to pass. I don’t know what’s happening. I describe it as ‘the dough is rising.’ And then at the end of the night, you need REM sleep, where presumably something else happens. And that’s what finally cements it all together.”
“A night of sleep,” says Dr. Matthew Walker of Harvard Medical School, “reorganizes the representation of a memory within the human brain, making memory more efficient.” In a test, Walker taught 12 healthy college-aged study subjects a finger-tapping test similar to piano lessons. The study subjects were retested either after 12 hours containing sleep or 12 hours of awake time. During the retesting, the brains of the study subjects were scanned by fMRI and their brain activity was watched. And the results were clear.
“After sleep, you improve your performance by about twenty percent to thirty percent,” says Walker. “Without sleep, there is no improvement. So practice with a good night’s sleep makes perfect.”
And the idea that you need a good night’s sleep to nail a newskill is quite evident when you talk to people who are practicing new skills, such as athletes and dancers.
“A gymnast tries and tries a certain move, and in total frustration after an hour just gets off the beam and says, ‘I’m going home.’ They come back the next day and they get on the beam, and they’ve got it. And it’s sort of magic, or they say, ‘Well, I must have been tired.’ But if you talk to them—if you asked them, ‘Well, if you practiced in the morning, would you come back in the afternoon?’ They’d say, ‘No, I’d wait until the next day.’ So for those sorts of skills, whether it’s a pianist stuck on a passage who finally has to put it away, or a gymnast, that, I think, is very likely to involve this kind of sleep stage requirement.”
Stickgold says that it doesn’t matter at what time during the day you do your training, as long as you get six-plus hours of sleep at night. Which explains why, as we get older, it gets harder to learn new skills—older people get less sleep. Maybe nature knows this. Maybe when we are young, our bodies know we need more sleep to learn new skills, so we sleep longer to consolidate them.
“Everybody knows that when you drop below six hours of sleep, you’re not running on all cylinders. And it’s just trying to fight a strange sort of macho culture thing of sleep deprivation being cool. And it’s a bad scene throughout the country, the amount of sleep deprivation. There are estimates that there might be more traffic fatalities from fatigue than even from alcohol.”
There is a study showing that immediately on waking up, people’s reaction times and reasoning times are equivalent to those when they’re legally drunk. You don’t want to jump out of bed and run an errand in the car. But if you’re a medical resident at a hospital on call for 24 or more hours, you have no choice.
“I think we want to say, ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ I think it’s a big problem. People seem to know it and seem not to want to deal
And what’s going on in your brain that you need this sleep to cement that practice? Stickgold took his students into his sleep lab to find out.
“We got very surprising results.”
What he found is that when you go through a night of sleep you go through a 90-minute sleep cycle. You go down into deep sleep and then come out of it into REM sleep, where you do most of your intense dreaming. This cycle gets repeated all night.
“And what we discovered is that to show improvement on the next day, you need good slow-wave—or deep—sleep in the first couple of hours of the night. And you need REM sleep, but only after six hours. And that’s probably why those students who got less than six hours didn’t show improvement.
“So you need two things to happen at night. You need to have something happen while you’re in deep sleep, earlier in the night. There’s three or four hours that have to pass. I don’t know what’s happening. I describe it as ‘the dough is rising.’ And then at the end of the night, you need REM sleep, where presumably something else happens. And that’s what finally cements it all together.”
“A night of sleep,” says Dr. Matthew Walker of Harvard Medical School, “reorganizes the representation of a memory within the human brain, making memory more efficient.” In a test, Walker taught 12 healthy college-aged study subjects a finger-tapping test similar to piano lessons. The study subjects were retested either after 12 hours containing sleep or 12 hours of awake time. During the retesting, the brains of the study subjects were scanned by fMRI and their brain activity was watched. And the results were clear.
“After sleep, you improve your performance by about twenty percent to thirty percent,” says Walker. “Without sleep, there is no improvement. So practice with a good night’s sleep makes perfect.”
And the idea that you need a good night’s sleep to nail a newskill is quite evident when you talk to people who are practicing new skills, such as athletes and dancers.
“A gymnast tries and tries a certain move, and in total frustration after an hour just gets off the beam and says, ‘I’m going home.’ They come back the next day and they get on the beam, and they’ve got it. And it’s sort of magic, or they say, ‘Well, I must have been tired.’ But if you talk to them—if you asked them, ‘Well, if you practiced in the morning, would you come back in the afternoon?’ They’d say, ‘No, I’d wait until the next day.’ So for those sorts of skills, whether it’s a pianist stuck on a passage who finally has to put it away, or a gymnast, that, I think, is very likely to involve this kind of sleep stage requirement.”
Stickgold says that it doesn’t matter at what time during the day you do your training, as long as you get six-plus hours of sleep at night. Which explains why, as we get older, it gets harder to learn new skills—older people get less sleep. Maybe nature knows this. Maybe when we are young, our bodies know we need more sleep to learn new skills, so we sleep longer to consolidate them.
“Everybody knows that when you drop below six hours of sleep, you’re not running on all cylinders. And it’s just trying to fight a strange sort of macho culture thing of sleep deprivation being cool. And it’s a bad scene throughout the country, the amount of sleep deprivation. There are estimates that there might be more traffic fatalities from fatigue than even from alcohol.”
There is a study showing that immediately on waking up, people’s reaction times and reasoning times are equivalent to those when they’re legally drunk. You don’t want to jump out of bed and run an errand in the car. But if you’re a medical resident at a hospital on call for 24 or more hours, you have no choice.
“I think we want to say, ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ I think it’s a big problem. People seem to know it and seem not to want to deal
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