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Britt Forum-Blogger© Original500© Member  Learning Contentment
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 Many school-aged children receive insufficient sleep. How does this affect school performance and grades? According to researchers, adequate sleep enhances both school performance and creativity. In addition, sleep permits children and adults to form insights and resolve problems from their waking hours. "Sleep's total isolation from the waking world seems designed to focus attention inward, on information already obtained that needs to get organized." Most importantly, a whole host of diseases can be linked to sleep deprivation, including depression, diabetes, injury, heart attack, stroke, even bipolar disorder. It has also been linked to hyperactivity. Is your child receiving adequate sleep? 3-6 Years Old : 10 ¾ - 12 hours per day 7-12 Years Old : 10 - 11 hours per day 12-18 Years Old : 8 ¼ - 9 ½ hours per day Source: WebMD The Secrets of Sleep It's a mystery, but it clearly makes us smarter and healthier! By Nell Boyce and Susan Brink U.S. News and World Report Posted 5/9/04 Health education teacher Pacy Erck remembers what it was like back when Edina High School students had to show up by 7:25 a.m. "The kids were always very tired," she recalls. But these days, Erck rarely has a kid nod off in class. That's because in the fall of 1996, officials at this Minnesota school decided to ring the first bell an hour later, at 8:30 a.m. Sleep researchers had reported that teens' natural slumber patterns favor a later bedtime, and the school wanted to ensure that its high schoolers weren't being shortchanged by an early wake-up call. The change means that students average five more hours of sleep a week, and teachers can see a difference. "You don't have the kids putting their heads down," Erck says. "The class is livelier." Research confirms real benefits not only at Edina but also at many other high schools that have made similar scheduling switches, says Kyla Wahlstrom, an education policy expert at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Grades have gone up, and dropout rates have declined. The results are impressive enough that other school systems have started to take notice. In Poquoson, Va., the school board has held public hearings over the past few months to consider making the first bell later. "We do believe our children aren't getting as much sleep as they ought to," says Jonathan Lewis, superintendent of schools in Poquoson. "We have children getting up at 5:30, quarter of 6 in the morning." But what is it about getting more sleep that's actually helping students do better? Is it just that sleepy kids can't concentrate in class because they're dozing off over their books, or does something happen in dreamland that affects the brain's ability to learn and remember? A growing number of scientists suspect that sleepless students may suffer more than just feeling dragged out during the day. Many intriguing studies in both humans and animals suggest that the sleeping brain does something to solidify memories and process newly learned lessons. The brain work of sleep may even allow people to form insights that they can't achieve while awake, according to research that gives new weight to the old notion of taking a tough problem and "sleeping on it." With most Americans routinely getting far less sleep than they should, some experts are starting to wonder if widespread sleep deprivation is having a real but unrecognized effect on society's brainpower and creativity. Sleep is clearly important--after all, people and animals slumber away a third of their lives--but no one knows why. The special learning potential of sleep is an idea that has long held sway in the popular culture: Consider those sketchy "learn while you sleep" audiotapes that promise to "tap into the power of your unconscious." But hard scientific evidence has been scant until recently. Most sleep research has focused on health, and sleep has been viewed mainly as a period of rest and rejuvenation for the body. That's why, for decades, most experts dismissed sleep as a boring, idle time for the brain. What they didn't realize is that while sleeping bodies lie motionless in bed, the brain's neurons continue to buzz and chatter. Only with the 1953 discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and the development of new machines to monitor brain activity did researchers begin to see what, exactly, was going on at night. Suddenly they could watch as the brain moved through predictable cycles of REM sleep--with its sometimes vivid dream imagery--and deeper "slow wave" sleep. Before long, some labs noticed that amounts of REM sleep increased as animals learned various tasks but went back to normal after tasks got mastered. What's more, experiments that deprived animals of REM sleep by disrupting them during this sleep stage found that they didn't learn as well as animals that got in plenty of dreaming. But the idea that sleep might aid smarts didn't catch fire. "Sleep wasn't supposed to be for that. It was supposed to be for restoration," recalls Carlyle Smith of Trent University in Ontario, who has studied sleep and learning for over 30 years. Slowly, though, the idea has attracted more interest, especially since the early 1990s. Part of the change is that scientists have redesigned experiments to counter critics' early objections, such as the possibility that the sleepless learn less because of stress and fatigue, not the loss of sleep-specific brain work. They've also realized that certain kinds of learning seem more linked to sleep than others. Memorizing lists of words or facts--what's called "declarative" memory--doesn't seem all that dependent on sleep. But scientists have lately gathered compelling evidence that people's "how to" learning, or "procedural memory," gets a boost from a bout of sleep. Last October, for example, Kimberly Fenn and colleagues at the University of Chicago showed sleep's benefits for this type of learning with the help of an annoying, outdated speech synthesizer. When Fenn's computer says "smart," the word comes out sounding more like "smote," and it's hard to figure out what word it's actually saying. "When people first come into the lab, they're really bad," Fenn says, but 30 minutes of training vastly improves their understanding of the garbled speech. What happens over the next 12 hours depends on whether they are allowed to sleep or not. In a series of carefully controlled studies, Fenn showed that while people's learned ability seems to fade away over the course of the day, a night's sleep brings it back. Test-takers who slept showed nearly twice as much improvement as those who did not. . . . Researchers can point to a whole list of diseases connected to sleep deprivation. A 67-year-old man with prostate problems wakes up to go to the bathroom half a dozen times a night, and one morning he has a heart attack. A 19-year-old college student with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder has too much energy to sleep for five nights running and spins into an episode of uncontrolled mania. A healthy man of 30 gets half his required sleep--four hours a night--for a week and ends up in a prediabetic state with the metabolism of his grandfather. An 82-year-old woman falls and breaks her hip, possibly for the same reason that a 42-year-old truck driver slams into a barrier at 3 a.m.--inattention and slowed response because of chronic partial sleep deprivation. Read the rest of the story HERE.
 "All that you have is your soul." --Tracy Chapman |
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shirohniichan Original500© Member  Obscurius per obscurum
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Many intriguing studies in both humans and animals suggest that the sleeping brain does something to solidify memories and process newly learned lessons. The brain work of sleep may even allow people to form insights that they can't achieve while awake, according to research that gives new weight to the old notion of taking a tough problem and "sleeping on it." With most Americans routinely getting far less sleep than they should, some experts are starting to wonder if widespread sleep deprivation is having a real but unrecognized effect on society's brainpower and creativity. Indeed it is having an effect on society's creativity! Why else would we see so many new movies based on old sitcoms?  I'm amazed how much my one-year old can sleep at times, and I'm almost envious. The difference in enthusiasm and curiosity between a well-slept child and a sleep-deprived child is huge.
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