Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
BABIES are more likely to remember things and learn when they are sleepy than when they are wide awake, researchers have discovered.
For the key to learning and memory in early life is a lengthy nap. Trials in Europe with 216 babies from six months to one year old indicated they were unable to remember new tasks if they did not have a lengthy sleep soon afterwards.
The University of Sheffield team in the UK suggested the best time to learn may be just before sleep and emphasised the importance of reading at bedtime. Experts believe sleep may be much more important in early years than at other ages.
People spend more of their time asleep as babies than at any other point in their lives. Yet the researchers, in Sheffield and Ruhr University Bochum, in Germany, say ‘strikingly little is known’ about the role of sleep in the first year of life.
They taught the children three new tasks involving playing with hand puppets. Half the babies slept within four hours of learning, while the rest either had no sleep or napped for fewer than 30 minutes.
The next day, the babies were encouraged to repeat what they had been taught. The results, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed sleeping like a baby was vital for learning.
On average one-and-a-half tasks could be repeated after having a substantial nap. Yet zero tasks could be repeated if there was little sleep time.
Dr Jane Herbert, from the department of psychology at the University of Sheffield, said: “Those who sleep after learning learn well, those not sleeping don’t learn at all.”
She said it had been assumed that ‘wide-awake was best’ for learning, but instead it may be the events just before sleep that are most important.
And that the findings showed ‘just how valuable’ reading books with children before sleep could be.
A study last year uncovered the mechanisms of memory in sleep. It showed how new connections between brain cells formed during sleep.
Prof Derk-Jan Dijk, a sleep scientist at the University of Surrey in the UK, said: “It may be that sleep is much more important at some ages than others, but that remains to be firmly established.”
There is also growing interest in sleep and memory at the other end of life. The two go hand-in-hand in your twilight years, particularly with underlying neurodegenerative disorders such as dementia. It is hoped that boosting sleep would ‘slow the rot’ of memory function.
The mechanism by which a good night’s sleep improves learning and memory has also been discovered by a team of scientists in China and the US who used advanced microscopy to witness new connections between brain cells - synapses - forming during sleep.
Their study, published in the journal Science, showed even intense training could not make up for lost sleep. Experts said it was an elegant and significant study, which uncovered the mechanisms of memory.
It is well known that sleep plays an important role in memory and learning. But what actually happens inside the brain has been a source of considerable debate.
