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Your Mom Was Right: You Need Your
Sleep
Patrick Doyle ‘04
Fire codes were nearly violated on Nov.
13, when students and faculty filled the chairs, aisles and floor of a
Tolentine lecture room to hear a presentation by Dr. Robert Stickgold.
Attendees arriving early were guaranteed only a space on the floor. Someone
even swiped the seat of Dr. Thomas Toppino, director of the Cognitive
Science Program, who introduced Stickgold. Toppino found a seat on the
floor next to some of his students.
The droves were all to see Stickgold, a bit of a rock star in the psychology/psychiatry
world and a professor from Harvard Medical School. Stickgold’s work
has been published in Science magazine and numerous psychology journals,
including Nature Neuroscience and the Journal of Clinical Psychology.
The lecture titled “Sleep, Memory, and Dreams: A Neurocognitive
Approach” focused on Stickgold’s research in the hazy, disputed
world of sleep. Not denying the current fight over the actual biological
function of sleep, Stickgold shared the neurocognitive theory that sleep
serves an important function in memory formation.
During waking hours, humans are constantly receiving and processing information
from the environment, allowing us to interact with our environments. However,
the reception and processing require nearly all of our brain’s resources.
The continuous onslaught of information limits our ability to reprocess
the information and store it in long-term memory.
According to Stickgold, however, sleep allows the brain time to reprocess
all of the information collected during waking hours, since external input
is shut off. Although unsure of the memory reprocessing procedure, his
research, along with others, shows a significant correlation between sleep
and the integration of memories. In a number of studies, Stickgold and
collaborators tested learning in sample groups as a product of sleep length.
His data shows that learning correlates with sleep length; in fact, a
minimum of six hours of sleep is required to consolidate learning into
long-term memory. His work supports what decades of parents and teachers
have told their students: Get a good night of sleep before a test.
“You need a full night of sleep,” said Stickgold. “That’s
my warning to my Harvard undergrads: you need at least six hours of sleep
to memorize what you’ve been studying. It doesn’t matter where
you went to prep school, what your IQ is, or how much your father makes—just
how much you sleep.”
Another find frightening to college students is the effect of alcohol.
“Drinking alcohol immediately before bed reduces learning by half,”
he said. Research shows that alcohol interrupts the sleep pattern, preventing
the brain from reprocessing the learning of the daytime.
Stickgold also spoke shortly of memory and dreams, refuting the common
misconception that dreams merely replay past experiences. Dreams are never
a recording of our waking experiences. Rather, he explained, “We
incorporate some elements of waking events into sleep—we put them
together, rather bizarrely, into a dream."
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