It turns out that nodding off (睡觉) in class may not be a bad idea, as a new study has shown that going to sleep shortly after learning new materials is the best way to remember them.
According to US lead author Jessica Payne, a psychologist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, nodding off after learning something new is like "telling" the sleeping brain what to remember. Along with colleagues, she studied 207 students who slept for at least six hours per night. Students were randomly (随机地) assigned to study something declarative (陈述的) at 9 am or 9 pm, and returned for testing 30 minutes, 12 hours or 24 hours later.
Declarative memory refers to the ability to consciously (有意识地) remember facts and events, and can be divided into memory for events and memory for facts about the world. People use both types of memory every day — remembering where they parked today or learning how a colleague prefers to be called.
At the 12-hour retest, memory was better following a night of sleep compared to a day of wakefulness (不眠). At the 24-hour retest, with all students having received both a full night of sleep and a full day of wakefulness, students' memories were greater when sleep happened shortly after learning rather than following a full day of wakefulness." Our study confirms that sleeping directly after learning something new is beneficial for memory. What's special for this study is that we have shown sleep's influence on declarative memory," Payne said. "Since we found that sleeping soon after learning benefited both types of memory, this means that it would be a good thing to go over any information you need to remember before going to bed. In some sense, you may be telling the sleeping brain what to consolidate (巩固)."
