Amazingly, your brain is on the go 24/7. It never stops! Even when you’re asleep, it’s busy. Makes sense then to nurture this incredible machine so that it’s in the best condition to take on all your learning challenges.
One of the cheapest and easiest ways to do this? Sleep! Yes, get a good night’s kip. For a third of our lives, we are asleep. Far from wasted time, it’s essential to our wellbeing. More to the point, our brains need sleep to function correctly.
Do you find it hard to remember things sometimes? If you’ve had a terrible night’s sleep, you’ll no doubt know that you do extra clumsy things, you are not alert, and that you forget important information.
Sleep is a no brainer
Sleep then is essential food for your brain as it helps you memorise and store facts and figures. Research has also proved that the different stages of sleep actually help consolidate memories. Plus, if you go to sleep three to four hours after intense study your ability to retain information vastly improves.
In short, this means that switching off early is brilliant for your brain. Not to mention that all night cramming sessions are no longer a good idea.
Proper sleep means that you wake up more refreshed, ready to take on those testing challenges. It’s literally a no-brainer!
How to keep your brain topped up with new knowledge
Research also shows that if we don’t stimulate our brains in the right way that 40% of knowledge learned is forgotten within 20 minutes. No wonder you can’t recall those pesky ‘An Inspector Calls’ quotes you learned last year!
The trick is to turn short term memory into long term memory. To do that, you need to actively move information around in your brain to make it stick for longer. Let’s look at how you could do this. If you just read a page of information say for History, or Science, it’ll probably fly right over your head and won’t be retained.
Instead, if you do something with the information – turn it into a visual mind-map, teach someone else what you’ve learnt, keep coming back to it, dictate the information you’ve learnt, apply the information just learned to a question – you’re more likely to store the information for longer.
So a fab night’s sleep means that your brain is more refreshed and receptive to learning, while learning techniques help keep your brain in gear for longer. See?
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Tags: brain function, how to boost short term memory, how to improve your memory, learning techniques