Sleep & Learning
by Theresa Masterson
1. A nap of about 90 minutes containing all the phases of sleep produces about the same gain in performance as 8 hours' sleep
2. REM Sleep-Dreams & signs of sexual arousal; highly studied but has produced little hard scientific evidence linking REM sleep to procedural learning
3. Slow Wave Sleep- Strengthens procedural learning, surrounds each bout of REM sleep
4. During training the brain tags the task as something that will be improved upon later
5. The brain tags tasks in 'chunks' giving higher priority to those that were the most difficult to learn
6. Four stages of slow wave sleep beginning with initial drowsiness and becoming progressively deeper.
7. The sleep-induced boost in performance on a learned typing task correlates with the amount of 'stage 2' slow-wave sleep
