Research indicates that sleep does more than allow the brain to rest; it may also aid the consolidation of long-term memories.
[1] Popular sayings can reflect the notion that remolded memories produce new creative associations in the morning, and that performance often improves after a time-interval that includes sleep.
[2] Current studies demonstrate that a healthy sleep produces a significant learning-dependent performance boost.
[5] The 'synaptic scaling' hypothesis suggests that sleep plays an important role in regulating learning that has taken place while awake, enabling more efficient and effective storage in the brain, making better use of space and energy.
[6] Healthy sleep must include the appropriate sequence and proportion of NREM and REM phases, which play different roles in the memory consolidation-optimization process.
Physiological studies have shown that aside from the occasional twitch, a person actually becomes paralyzed during REM sleep.
[13] Two of the groups learned word pairs, then either slept or stayed awake, and were tested again.
[14] Research has shown that taking an afternoon nap increases learning capacity.
The investigators found that the subjects who engaged only in NREM sleep did not show much improvement.
[6] A 2009 study[17] based on electrophysiological recordings of large ensembles of isolated cells in the prefrontal cortex of rats revealed that cell assemblies that formed upon learning were more preferentially active during subsequent sleep episodes.
This study has shown that neuronal patterns in large brain networks are tagged during learning so that they are replayed, and supposedly consolidated, during subsequent sleep.
In the United States, sleep deprivation is common with students because almost all schools begin early in the morning and many of these students either choose to stay awake late into the night or cannot do otherwise due to delayed sleep phase syndrome.
[24] Research shows that different remote learning modalities significantly affect nursing students' perceptions of their sleep quality.
In 2009, Monkseaton High School, in North Tyneside, had 800 pupils aged 13–19 starting lessons at 10 a.m. instead of the normal 9 a.m. and reported that general absence dropped by 8% and persistent absenteeism by 27%.