From this point, it may only get worse. We are going to tell you the delightfully good things that happen when you get to sleep and the alarming things that happen when you don’t get enough.
Let me start with the brain and the functions of learning and memory. We know that our brain is important to us because it commands our body on what to do.
Some studies also discovered in past 10 that you need sleep after learning so that we can store the new memories and learnings to our brains.
But recently, we discovered that you also need to sleep before learning to prepare your brain. It’s like a dry sponge ready to absorb new information.
That’s why without it, the memory circuits of the brain basically become drenched and you can’t absorb new memories.
Here in this study, the researcher in TED decided to test the theory that pulling an all-nighter was a good idea.
So, they took a group of individuals and had assigned them to one of two experimental groups: the sleep group and the sleep deprivation group.
Now the sleep group, they’re going to get a full eight hours of slumber, but the deprivation group, they’re going to keep them awake in the laboratory, under full supervision.
The next day, they put those participants inside an MRI scanner and allow them to try and learn a whole list of new facts as the researchers are taking snapshots of brain activity.
After that, they have tested them to see how effective learning has been. The result is unbelievable, there has been a 40-percent deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories for people without sleep.
This is quite disturbing because the percentage is so big that a person loses almost half of what they’ve learned.
That’s why the researchers further investigate, and they have discovered what goes wrong within your brain to produce these types of learning disabilities.
There’s a structure that sits on the left and the right side of your brain called the hippocampus.
This is the informational inbox of your brain or like a memory card. It’s very good at receiving new memory files and then holding on to them.
Memory Inbox of Our Brain
When you look at this structure in those people who’d had a full night of sleep, the researcher saw lots of healthy learning-related activity.
Yet in those people who were sleep-deprived, we couldn’t find any significant signal whatsoever.
Therefore, sleep deprivation can shut down your memory inbox. The new incoming files or information are just being bounced.
You couldn’t effectively commit new experiences to memory. That’s the negative effects not sleeping properly.
Do you remember those people that got a full eight hours of sleep?
Well, they’ve discovered that there are big, powerful brainwaves that happen during the very deepest stages of sleep that are riding on top of these spectacular bursts of electrical activity that we call sleep spindles.
It is the combined quality of these deep-sleep brainwaves that acts like a file-transfer mechanism at night.
They are shifting memories from a short-term vulnerable pool to a more permanent long-term storage site within the brain.
Therefore, long-term memories or information will be protected and making them safe.
That’s why it is important that we understand the memory benefits that sleeping can give. This is a real medical and societal implications.
Tips for Sleeping Comfortably
The first tip that we can give you is regularity. You should go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s the weekday or the weekend. Regularity is sovereign, and it will anchor your sleep and improve the quantity and the quality of that sleep.
The second is to keep it cool. Your body needs to drop its core temperature by about two to three degrees Fahrenheit to initiate sleep and then to stay asleep.
That’s also the reason why you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that is cold rather than hot.
Therefore, better aim for a bedroom temperature of around 65 degrees, or about 18 degrees Celsius. That’s going to be optimal for the sleep of most people.
We believe it is now time for us to reclaim our right to have a full night of sleep, and without embarrassment or the unfortunate shame of laziness.
With that, we can be reunited with the most powerful elixir of life, that is sleep.