With exactly 40 days left until the exams that will determine my fate fall upon me, I am left wondering how in the world am I going to prepare for them. I hope many of you are thinking about this too, I really do hope so, because as university students time will never be on our side. Fortunately, there are some scientifically proven things you can do to make the most of whatever time you have left after doing all those assignments and procrastinating a little (a lot) along the way. This will be a 2-part series that expands on some well-known study tips and introduces a couple of new ones that you may not have heard of. Enjoy.
1. Skip the 8am…
A few days ago, I only got 3 hours of sleep because I had to get up at 5 (perks of living on the Westside) to be on time for a riveting lecture on logic gates. On the way there, while sitting on the bus amongst equally groggy-looking faces, I wondered who came up with the idea of having lectures so early and if they ever had to go through the same thing ever… probably not.
In an April 2017 study, 190 undergraduate students were surveyed on their preferred times for sleeping and found that night owls far outnumbered early birds. No surprises there – the biological clocks of young adults are naturally set at different times to those of the older generations. What was surprising was when they used these biological clock phenomena or, “adolescent circadian timings”, from other studies as well to create a theoretical model that determined a range of starting times for classes. According to this study, 83% of us could perform at our best if we got those few extra hours of sleep and went to class at around 10 or 11am. For the other 17% well, lucky you for being early risers, I envy you.
And this doesn’t just apply to university students. Starting later can also benefit the performance and health of high-schoolers and primary kids. So, if you have a younger sibling and they’re running late or don’t feel like going to school because they’re too tired, tell them to relax, get a few winks and go to class later. Because they have a scientifically validated excuse… that’s just how our bodies work, miss.
2. … and get some sleep!
This one’s pretty obvious. It’s been known for a long time that getting a good night’s sleep can lead to better learning the next day and yet some of us still don’t give a damn about our brain’s restorative and healing processes. Although this was only a correlation between the two activities, a recent study has found a strong causal connection between sleep and learning – that is, sleep really does lead a better learning outcome. For the most efficient learning, however, your brain not only requires sleep, it requires deep sleep.
To find this connection, researchers from Switzerland discovered a new way to disturb a person’s sleep without actually disturbing the person itself. Next, they recruited a bunch of participants to sleep in their lab overnight just to get them used to sleeping under regular deep sleep in an unfamiliar environment. On the next night, their sleep was manipulated. During the day after each night, the participants were trained to tap their fingers in a particular order. The researchers found that there was a decrease in their ability to learn the new order of tapping after the night of disturbed sleep compared to the day after the deep sleep. This was so even though the participants felt like they had the same quality of sleep for both nights.
This is probably why many of us have felt like mush after waking up because our brains haven’t had enough deep sleep even when we think that we got enough hours. It’s not just about how long you sleep, people, it’s also about the quality of sleep!
3. Have a Drink
Too much drinking can impair your memory (you might remember asking yourself what you did the night before… or not) but it’s not because the alcohol is killing your brain cells. Only long-term drinking can do damage, specifically to the dendrites of brain cells which pass messages from one neuron to another. This is what happens in Korsakoff’s syndrome, an alcohol-related brain disorder. People with this disorder generally have problems with memory, confusion, eye paralysis and muscle coordination.
And I repeat, this only occurs in long-term alcohol consumption so don’t be alarmed (unless you’re reading this while on your 10th pint in which case, I’m impressed). Over the short-term, alcohol can actually improve your memory when it comes to things you learned right before you started drinking. In a May 2017 study, 88 university students were made to learn a bunch of words and then tested to see how many they remembered. Afterwards, half of the students could drink as much as they wanted (while the other half probably wallowed through the night, wondering why they were the unlucky ones). The next morning, they all took another test to see how many words they still remembered. Both groups had done equally well on the test before half of them began drinking but remarkably, the group that drank to their heart’s content improved their word recall the next morning.
Realising that alcohol could improve memory isn’t a new thing. In 1981, a study showed that people who drank after looking at some pictures remembered more of them than people who didn’t drink. So why does this happen? Unfortunately, the best explanation we have right now is that alcohol blocks new information coming in and so the brain has more resources available to turn information that was recently learned into long-term memories. I’m not going to get into the neurochemistry of it all.
Note that this one is for the over… actually, it’s for everyone since New Zealand doesn’t have a minimum legal drinking age. But still, alcohol kills more than 3 million people per year and impairs your memory for things that happen while drinking. So, don’t go around drinking booze while studying or giving it babies to make them smarter; there are other ways to do that… like books, maybe.
That’s it for this week, tune in next week (or before exams, at the latest) for some tips you really haven’t heard of…
Nicholas Kondal
Science Scholars 2017 