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Authors: Ira Flatow
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with it. There was a wonderful study with students, where they would wake them up in the middle of the night—math majors—and askthem to do math problems. And they would write out the solutions to these math problems and go back to bed. And when they checked them afterwards, they discovered that for the first line or two, they’d be doing fine, and then it would just be garbage. I think there’s a real issue there for how much they’re learning. But even more important, when you wake someone up from deep sleep and you look at their EEG—their EEG says their brain is still asleep—and I think some of these residents are prescribing while they’re still asleep.”
These new findings about sleep and consolidation of skills may explain why teenagers and babies sleep so much. Dr. Walker says that infants’ brains are continually learning new motor skills, which may demand a great deal of sleep to consolidate. As for teens, they may be playing sports, learning to play an instrument, or learning to drive a car—all practiced skills that need sleep to be cemented into the brain’s wiring.
Injured brains may benefit from sleep too. “A good night of sleep may be able to help reestablish connections in the brain of stroke victims,” says Walker. “Since the brain undergoes these plastic changes, patients can take on new tasks and learn new ways of doing things they did prior to their stroke. Sleep may incrementally assist their recovery.”
Walker and his colleagues plan on taking this next step: testing this theory with stroke victims to see if their condition improves with sleep.
So to learn a new skill, to perfect that new Mozart concerto, nothing may help more than a good night’s sleep.
CHAPTER SIX
WHERE THE VERY BIG MEETS THE VERY LITTLE
There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Isn’t the universe supposed to be getting easier to understand? I mean, aren’t all the smart people who study quantum physics, relativity, string theory, extra dimensions, and water on Mars and bring back samples from comets encased in tennis racket–like foam collectors supposed to be making the world look simpler? If so, then why does it appear that the more we know, the more we don’t know? The more we learn, the more there is to learn? Still?
I mean here it is the twenty-first century. A hundred years since Einstein was in his heyday, almost four decades since humans set foot on the moon, 50 years since Sputnik, not to mention the Voyager missions to the planets and telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, that can peer 13 billion years back into time. It is the age of leptons, baryons, muons, neutrinos, and antimatter. Yet we stillhave no idea what 96 percent of the universe is made of. (And oh, by the way, we didn’t know that we didn’t know what most of the universe was made of until very recently.) And we don’t know why there shouldn’t be more of the stuff we don’t know about, either.
It’s very humbling. But at the same time, very exciting. “It’s the golden age of physics. I wouldn’t want to live in any other time.” You hear that a lot from astronomers, theoretical physicists, and mathematicians whose numbers cover blackboards across the world. There is no better time to be present at the future than in the wild and woolly world of physics.
On the other hand, the more physicists discover about the universe, the stranger it appears. “I don’t see much indication of it getting terribly simple just yet,” says Dr. Roger Penrose, professor of mathematics at Oxford. “I think one likes to think that eventually there will be some simple principle that governs everything, but we’re certainly a long way from that
These new findings about sleep and consolidation of skills may explain why teenagers and babies sleep so much. Dr. Walker says that infants’ brains are continually learning new motor skills, which may demand a great deal of sleep to consolidate. As for teens, they may be playing sports, learning to play an instrument, or learning to drive a car—all practiced skills that need sleep to be cemented into the brain’s wiring.
Injured brains may benefit from sleep too. “A good night of sleep may be able to help reestablish connections in the brain of stroke victims,” says Walker. “Since the brain undergoes these plastic changes, patients can take on new tasks and learn new ways of doing things they did prior to their stroke. Sleep may incrementally assist their recovery.”
Walker and his colleagues plan on taking this next step: testing this theory with stroke victims to see if their condition improves with sleep.
So to learn a new skill, to perfect that new Mozart concerto, nothing may help more than a good night’s sleep.
CHAPTER SIX
WHERE THE VERY BIG MEETS THE VERY LITTLE
There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Isn’t the universe supposed to be getting easier to understand? I mean, aren’t all the smart people who study quantum physics, relativity, string theory, extra dimensions, and water on Mars and bring back samples from comets encased in tennis racket–like foam collectors supposed to be making the world look simpler? If so, then why does it appear that the more we know, the more we don’t know? The more we learn, the more there is to learn? Still?
I mean here it is the twenty-first century. A hundred years since Einstein was in his heyday, almost four decades since humans set foot on the moon, 50 years since Sputnik, not to mention the Voyager missions to the planets and telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, that can peer 13 billion years back into time. It is the age of leptons, baryons, muons, neutrinos, and antimatter. Yet we stillhave no idea what 96 percent of the universe is made of. (And oh, by the way, we didn’t know that we didn’t know what most of the universe was made of until very recently.) And we don’t know why there shouldn’t be more of the stuff we don’t know about, either.
It’s very humbling. But at the same time, very exciting. “It’s the golden age of physics. I wouldn’t want to live in any other time.” You hear that a lot from astronomers, theoretical physicists, and mathematicians whose numbers cover blackboards across the world. There is no better time to be present at the future than in the wild and woolly world of physics.
On the other hand, the more physicists discover about the universe, the stranger it appears. “I don’t see much indication of it getting terribly simple just yet,” says Dr. Roger Penrose, professor of mathematics at Oxford. “I think one likes to think that eventually there will be some simple principle that governs everything, but we’re certainly a long way from that
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