Sleep alternation method: learn faster, remember more firmly!

Sleep alternation method: learn faster, remember more firmly!

A study published in the journal 'Psychological Science' stated that sleeping during study can make it easier to recall what you have learned, and even to recall something you have forgotten for 6 months.

Psychologist Stephanie Mazza of the University of Lyon said: “Our research results show that alternate sleep during practice can increase the effect by a factor of two, reduce the time spent on re-learning, and maintain longer-term memory. The past Studies have shown that sleeping after learning is helpful for learning. But now we have found that sleeping during learning is more effective.”

Although studies have shown that repetitive exercises and sleep can help improve memory, few studies have focused on how repetition and sleep combined affect memory. Mattress Mazza and colleagues speculate that sleeping during the study period can make the relearning process more efficient and reduce the effort required to store information in the memory.

This study convened a total of 40 French adults, who were randomly divided into 'sleeping' and 'awake' groups. In the first stage, all subjects were presented with 16 pairs of French and Swahili words in random order. After 7 seconds of learning, only Swahili words remained, and the subjects chose a French translation. The correct result appears after 4 seconds. All words that have not been translated correctly will reappear until each word is translated correctly.

12 hours after the first stage of learning, the subjects completed this task again until all 16 words were correctly translated.

It is important that part of the subjects completed the first phase of the task in the morning, and the second phase of the task in the evening (the 'awake' group); the other part of the testee completed the first phase of the task at night. Then go to bed, wake up in the morning and complete the second phase of the task ('sleep' group).

In the first stage, the learning situation of the two groups is almost the same.

But after 12 hours, the results were different: participants in the 'sleeping' group memorized an average of 10 words, while the 'awake' group had 7.5 words. When they repeat the study, people in the 'sleep' group can recall 16 words only 3 times, while those in the 'awake' group need 6 times.

In the end, both groups remembered 16 words, but sleep seems to make the subjects spend less time.

Mazza said: 'The memory that was not available at the beginning of relearning seems to be changed in some way by sleep. This change allows the test subject to encode information faster, saving time in the relearning process.'

The memory improvement that subjects get from sleep during learning seems to last a long time. The following data on the mattress showed that people in the 'sleeping' group performed better after one week. The 'sleep' group forgot even less, they remembered 15 words, while the 'awake' group only remembered 11. After 6 months, this effect is still obvious.

The benefits of sleep in the experiment cannot be attributed to the difference in the quality of sleep of the subjects and their long-term or short-term memory ability, because there is no difference in these measurements between the two groups.

Mazza concluded: 'The results of this study show that alternate sleep during learning can easily and effectively improve the ability to remember information in the long term.'