Page 6 - THE ORACLE MAGAZINE SUMMER'23 EDITION

If I had to give every student one piece of advice
on how to get through a school year with a
healthy life and good grades it would be this:
sleep more! The notion that sleeping saves your
life is not an overstatement. Getting at least
eight hours of sleep every night is the
foundation of health and success. One way to
get started is to read the book Why We Sleep by
Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience
who has dedicated his life to the study of sleep
and all its benefits. What happens when you
spend a long night awake without dreaming and
without natural sleep cycles? A buildup of this
unhealthy regime dramatically increases the
risk of the following: Alzheimer’s disease,
diabetes, depression, obesity, and many more
life-altering conditions. When your body is in a
coma-like state of sleep, the brain is doing hard
work to regenerate neuronal connections and
clear away the accumulation of metabolic waste
created during waking hours.
Sleep is also a good tip for studying. Information
that we have absorbed throughout the day is
converted from short-term memory to long-
term memory when we are sleeping.
Additionally, sleep also prepares you to learn
more efficiently the following day. The sleep
state can be divided into two different cycles:
REM (rapid eye movement) and NREM (non-
rapid eye movement). Both of these sleep stages
repeat about every 90 minutes with the ratio of
each stage changing with each cycle. The NREM
sleep stage is responsible for consolidating
memories and information.
The phrase ‘sleep on it to clear your head’
should be taken quite literally. The brain clears
away all waste compounds accumulated during
the day and also strengthens memories that are
considered important or salient.
S L E E P 1 0 1
Research indicates that memories are
formed in the hippocampus and are later
stored in the prefrontal cortex. The brain
effectively ‘replays’ these memories
throughout the REM stage, which serves to
organise and combine pieces of information.
One can easily test this idea. Just prior to
sleeping, read your textbook, your notes, or
any other information you wish to retain.
Assuming you slept well and for a sufficient
number of hours, you are very likely to
experience better recall of the information
you studied prior to sleeping. Of course, this
is not a trick for cheating, but it is, in fact, a
‘brain hack’ of sorts. Recall improves with
consistent practice.
Memories and information travel as
electrical nerve impulses down the axons of
neurons. To relay this information from one
neuron to the next, it temporarily converts
into a chemical impulse and travels across
the synaptic junction: a gap between two
individual neurons. If the synapse is used on
a regular basis and for a sufficient period of
time, the cell adapts by increasing the
number of receptors in the synapse, thus
boosting the activity, or potentiation, of the
cell.
To live longer, sleep longer! To further
strengthen my argument and to persuade
the skeptic, I should also note that proper
sleep improves mood, increases
attentiveness, reduces stress, relieves
anxiety, and generally improves cognitive
skills. The health benefits of sleep are now
incontrovertible, therefore appropriate
priority should be given to managing your
time properly in order to dedicate a couple
of hours more to your nighttime sleep
schedule.
A M E L I E B E L C H E R
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THE ORACLE MAGAZINE