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Learning Challenge, Sleep Pt. 5

This week, I continue learning more about sleep and its benefits by reading the article entitled "Science of Slumber: How Sleep Affects Your Memory" by National Public Radio.

Right from the start, one thing I really like about this article is that it backs up what it claims with some level of empirical knowledge. The professor notes that as we get older, our memory decays and the level of our sleep does as well. This is seen in the brainwaves that they can monitor as we sleep. In general, I note how I would like to see empirical evidence to back up the ideas in the article, and this is a step in the right direction.

But the empirics don't stop there. They mention comparing two groups in a suited, one inn which they compare a group during the day, and 12 hours later, and the other group, they compare after a night of sleep. Comparing the results, it seems that the group that sleeps well will perform better.

The article also mentions how people can need different levels of sleep as well. But overall, the main idea is how a lack of sleep can affect our performance. As students, we generally want to sacrifice sleep in order to study for a big test coming up, but this article suggests that maybe this is not the most optimal choice we can make for ourselves. Instead of choosing studying over sleep, it might be better to choose sleeping over studying, as in the long term, our performance on the test the next day might be significantly better.

Overall, the topic of sleep is something that we know relatively little about, but we can always expand our knowledge. It's an interesting topic, and it's great to see more empirical evidence involved.


Sleep is an essential part of the memory process. Source: Wikipedia

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