Many of you may be struggling on when is the best time to study. Although you may think going to sleep immediately after studying may cause you forgetting all the things you have studied, study has shown that our brain memorize the best when we go sleep immediately after studying.

Sleep is important for memory!

There has been previous research saying that sleep enhances our memories using a untraditional mem
ory system. The research is from Michigan State University and the lead researcher Kimberly Fenn stated, “there is substantial evidence that during sleep, your brain is processing information without your awareness and this ability may contribute to memory in a waking state.” This ability, however, varies in the 250 participants of the study as most people showed huge improvement in memories but some showed no enhancement. From this study, we know that sleep is an essential element for improving study efficiency.

Let your brain rehearse the information! 

Have you ever experienced studying overnight for a exam but forgetting everything during the exam? Have you experience the helpless feeling when you know you have studied this but it is just not coming up? This happens because your brain need time to ‘rehearse’ the information processed. There is a study a year later that shows that going to sleep after studying can make our memories fade much slower. The study was carried out among 207 Harvard student who were required to remember a set of related and unrelated word pairs. Participants were randomly assigned to do a retest after 30 minutes (morning and evening), 12 hours (with sleep and without sleep), and 24 hours (with sleep). The result supported the hypothesis. For the 30 minutes retest, the result did not show a difference between the morning and evening period, meaning studying during daytime or nighttime does not influence short term memories, For the 12 hours retest, those who slept overnight has a significantly better result in remembering unrelated word pair comparing to those who stayed awake all the time. Similarly, in the 24 hours retest, those who started studying at 9 p.m. and went to sleep immediately after studying has a better result than those who started studying at 9 a.m., stayed awake for 12 hours first, and then went to sleep. The difference between 12 hours and 24 hours retest is that the 12 hours group shows difference in result in the two types of word pairs but the 24 hours group has similar results in both word pair types. The conclusion is that going to sleep after studying results in better memorization of information. (Of course there is still chance that it is a false positive.)

It made me think of my experience of my first psychology exam. I started study at night and went to sleep thinking I still have a lot of things that I can’t remember. However, during the test next morning, I suddenly feel like I can remember everything that I read the night before, including those I thought I would have forgotten. This may because I went to sleep immediately after study and it tells my brain to memorize the information.

Mechanism?

The mechanism is still unclear because it is hard to conclude whether sleep enhances memory or being awake lead to memory lost, as the research has also mentioned. Maybe the mechanism is related to Kimberly Fenn’s research that we are not using the traditional system to process informations during asleep and this helps with memorizing the information given to the brain just before sleep. Even though we do not know the exact mechanism yet, the study can still be correct. However, more studies should definitely be done. The one question I thought of after looking at this study is that, does the time of sleeping matters in this condition? Will sleeping for 3 hours or 8 hours make a difference in memory retention? Also, will sleeping during daytime or nighttime affect the result too? Leave your comments below if you have any thoughts!

Final word and you may have heard of it thousand times already: Never ever study overnight.

Work Cited:

http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2011/people-learn-while-they-sleep-study-suggests/

http://wellbeingwire.meyouhealth.com/healthy-behaviors/sleep-may-improve-memory-and-learning/

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0033079

http://magazine.good.is/articles/if-you-sleep-after-you-study-you-ll-remember-more