PHOTOGENIC MEMORY(Photographic Memory)

Photographic Memory

Eidetic or photographic memory is popularly defined as the ability to recall images, sounds, or objects in memory with extreme accuracy and in abundant volume.
Photographic memory is a rare element that is found in less than 10% of the population. It will often be found in children, and most of them will lose this ability by the time they become adults. The concept of photographic memory is so rare that someone people don't believe it exists.

What is believed by some researchers is that photographic memory is a result of the brain processing and storing information in an abnormal manner. Many people believe that those who have photographic memories are fortunate. However, this may not be the case.

One of the problems with having a photographic memory is that you may absorb too much information, and you may have to deal with a lot of data that is irrelevant. Having to deal with large amounts of irrelevant data could reduce your ability to efficiently recall information. People who have photographic memories may also have a hard time forgetting things that they don't desire to remember. Humans are not designed to be mere databases which store tremendous amounts of information. Memory is only important when it can be used to recall information that is relevant. Being able to use your memory is much more important than simply being able to store information.

Monks who lived during the Middle Ages would enhance their memories by creating images in their minds which would allow them to store and use information that was important. It was not enough for them to just store and have access to large amounts of information. It was also important for them to use these images to create a number of connections between unrelated elements. A number of famous people were believed to have photographic memories, and some of them were Mozart and Claude Monet. However, there has been some controversy which has arisen on the topic of photographic memory.

Many professionals believe that the concept is a myth. A study was conducted on a number of chess Grandmasters, and while they are able to recall large amounts of information about positions, they performed like people who weren't masters when they were presented with chess piece positions that would not exist in a real world situation. At the same time, there has also been evidence to show that photographic memory is a real phenomenon. A woman who was studied by Charles Stromeyer was capable of remembering poetry that had been written in a different language, and she could recall the information years later.

Solomon V. Shereshevskii is another example of an individual who had memory capabilities that appeared to be photographic. He could memorize large amounts of words, and was capable of remembering them after many years had passed. While some believed that he had an unlimited photographic memory, it is very likely that he used a number of different memory techniques. In addition to this, a number of humans have been placed in the Guinness Book of Records for having abnormal memories. There have also been people with Asperger's syndrome who have demonstrated photographic memories as well.

The overall evidence for photographic memory is strong. However, it is not well understood. The brain of someone who has a photographic memory will store information in a manner which is much different than most people. It is likely that the perception of photographic memory that is viewed by most people is not quite accurate. While there are people who have extraordinary memories, it is unlikely that they are able to perfectly recall every piece of information that they are exposed to. It is likely that the debate for and against the existence of photographic memory will continue to rage on. Some savants have been known to have what appears to be a photographic memory, and the most notable example is Kim Peek

Color and Learning

The color of a room or a computer screen can change the atmosphere of a room and behavior. Find out which colors you may want to select and which ones to avoid.

Colors send signals to the brain without us even thinking about it. Some are soothing, some are not. Some help us focus, some are distracting.
Pale Yellow/Almond
If you were to select the best colors for bedrooms and classrooms, which colors would be best? Dunn and Dunn have found that pale yellow and almond seem to be the best colors for not irritating anyone. These colors would be a good general color for school hallways.
Light Pink/Rose
Light pink and rose are very soothing colors. They would be very suitable for a BD classroom, Behavior Disorder, or a Kindergarten room where activity is high. Some basketball teams paint the opponent's locker room pink hoping to "calm" them before the game. Some jails are painted pink.
Green
Creativity seems to be inspired by the color green. An art room would be the choice for green as well as a creative writing classroom.
Blue
Blue is the color of academics. A science or math room would be a good candidate for this color. Light blue could also be a good overall classroom color. It is also soothing and computer screens are often light blue for a good reason. When bright or irritating colors are used on computers, students are not able to work without figeting, work for shorter lengths of time and become more aggressive toward each other. Computer screens, especially in BD, Behavior Disorder, rooms and for ADHD students, should be pale blue or pale pink.

Orange, Yellow and Red
These are often called Hot Dog colors. Bright yellow excites the brain and body. This may be a great color for an exercise room but not a bedroom or study hall.
The color orange seems to agitate. Painting a bedroom orange would probably keep the child awake longer at night. Putting two siblings into an orange bedroom would probably result in them not sleeping and fighting, as well. Orange would probably be the worst color to paint a school cafeteria.
Color and Food
Red often triggers hunger. What colors are used for fast food restaurant signs? KFC, Hardees, McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Burger King and convenience stores have what colors on their roofs, buildings and signs? You may not have been hungry until you looked at the sign. Suddenly, you have the urge for a shake, fries and a burger. That is not a coincidence.
You send a child to their room to do homework. Red pillows and decorations fill the room. Don't be surprised if the child comes out for snacks often while doing homework.
Color, lighting, temperature all affect our brains, bodies, how we learn and how we behave.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a picture with natural colors may be worth a million, memory-wise. Psychologists have documented that "living color" does more than appeal to the senses. It also boosts memory for scenes in the natural world. The findings, reported in the May issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, published by the American Psychological Association (APA), shed light on how the visual system efficiently exploits color information. Conceivably, by hanging an extra "tag" of data on visual scenes, color helps us to process and store images more efficiently than colorless (black and white) scenes, and as a result to remember them better, too.
In Europe, a trio of psychologists conducted five experiments (participants, in order, numbered 36, 34, 31, 20 and 20) to explore color's role in memory for natural scenes such as forests, rocks and flowers. In the basic experiment, participants looked at 48 photographs, half in color and half in black and white. Then, they viewed the same 48 images randomly mixed with 48 new images, and indicated if they had seen (or not) each picture. Participants remembered the colored natural scenes significantly better than they remembered black and white images, regardless of how long they saw the images.
People who saw images in color but were tested on them in black and white, and vice versa, did not remember them as well. This finding suggests that image colors are part and parcel of initial storage, attached to how objects "appear" in our memory.
Through experimental variations, the researchers ruled out whether color's built-in appeal caused the advantage by grabbing participants' attention better than would black and white. Among other findings, people did not remember falsely colored natural scenes any better than scenes in black and white -- suggesting that it wasn't any color that strengthened memory, but rather natural color. Says co-author Karl Gegenfurtner, Ph.D., "It appears as if our memory system is tuned, presumably by evolution and/or during development, to the color structure found in the world. If stimuli are too strange, the system simply doesn't engage as well, or deems them unimportant." Gegenfurtner, who was with the Max-Planck Institut fur Biologische Kybernetik when the experiments were conducted, is now with Giessen University.
The visual industries may find these studies valuable. "Perhaps designers should be aware that, in order to engage or grab one's attention (as in advertising), bright colors might well be most suitable," Wichmann observes. "If, on the other hand, the aim is more to have an image stick in the viewer's memory, unnatural colors may not be suitable."
So ultimately we can say that there is relation between colour and learning

INTELLIGENCE AND ENVIRONMENT

Despite what many people think, your social environment can also play an important role in the development of your intelligence. Geniuses aren’t only born – they can be made too. Certainly, you are born with a certain amount of intelligence and you may never achieve the intellectual abilities of someone else born with a different set of genes but equally, poor social nurturing can mean that you may never full realise the potential in your own genes.
The Heritability of IQ
It is widely accepted that intelligence is a trait that is passed down through the generations and the degree to which the intelligence quotient (IQ) is dependent on your genetic background has been extensively researched. For example, several traits are known to be primarily genetic, such as adult height or eye colour whereas other traits have low heritability, meaning that they are heavily influenced by the environment – such as depression in men. The way this is measured is by seeing how much a certain trait varies in people with very similar or different genetic and environmental backgrounds.
Thus, it is believed that genetics can account for 75% of your adult intelligence, with the environment being responsible for the remaining 25%. However, what is interesting is that research has found only a few specific genes which have a distinct, substantial effect on IQ – which means that intelligence is probably the result of the action of numerous genes, and their interaction with environmental stimuli, rather than the product of a specific “intelligence gene”.
The Social Development of IQ
Despite the big role that genetic plays in determining intelligence, social and environmental factors can have an important influence too. In fact, research shows that aside from genes and formal education, early family environments also play a crucial role. Evidence shows that a baby’s intelligence is not fully developed at birth but gradually evolves and changes, especially throughout the early elementary school years.
Parents actually a greater impact on their child’s IQ than any other person or institution in the child’s life, including schools and this impact is greatest during infancy and childhood, up to the age of eight or nine, after which parental influence diminishes. Things parents can do to improve their child’s IQ include: maintaining your own education, getting good nutrition and prenatal care, spending as much time with the child as possible, interacting and stimulating his mind through reading, shapes, numbers, colours, etc and exposing the child to experience outside the home.
Certain studies have linked specific activities with improved mental function. For example, one piece of research suggests that musical training can lead to the development of higher brain functions and in particular, better mathematical ability. Music is believed to enhance the brain's ability to visualise and transform objects in space and time, as well as the ‘hard wiring' for spatial-temporal reasoning. Another study showed that babies brought up in a stimulating environment (starting from in the womb) were more dynamic, alert and curious, with good hand-eye coordination and high social skills.
Keeping up the Challenge
Many researchers believe that human and animal brains remain “plastic” throughout their lifetimes, with a great capacity to change. This means that our brains remain strongly influenced by environmental conditions. In fact, studies have shown that stimulating environments increase brain thickness, the number of neurons in the brain and the number of connections between these neurons. In addition, putting the test subject back in a boring environment produced a decrease in responses by as much as 60% within a week. All this supports the advice to continually stimulate your brain throughout your life, even after reaching adulthood, and to promote the development of a broad range of interest and skills which are mental, physical, aesthetic, social and emotional.
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Intelligence: Heredity-Environment Debate Resolved?
According to neuro and cognitive scientists, different intellectual abilities are based on neural circuits that require environmental stimulation for development -- and are open to change.
However, intelligence researchers argue that there is a general factor of intelligence ("G") that is highly heritable and defines intelligence as an overall innate ability to perform well on different measures of intelligence -- which are not open to change.
This debate is reviewed in an analysis of 124 studies of the underlying basis of intelligence in the January issue of Psychological Review published by the American Psychological Association.
Does one have to be a child Einstein to be an adult Einstein? Yes, if the developing brain has the ability to make the right connections, according to this theory.
"You could present a person with an IQ of 200 with the appropriate phenomena when they are 20 years old, after the critical learning period, and they would not have the capacity to adapt their brains to the new phenomena,"

Intelligence varies with at least 21 factors
Some of the other circumstances and attributes that have been found to vary to a greater or lesser (but always significant) extent in relation with IQ (Bouchard & Segal, 1985; Liungman, 1975) - note that not all of these relationships support an environmental view.
Intelligence varies with:
• Infant malnutrition (-ve)
• Birth weight
• Birth order
• Height
• Number of siblings (-ve)
• Number of years in school
• Social group of parental home
• Father's profession
• Father's economic status
• Degree of parental rigidity (-ve)
• Parental ambition
• Mother's education
• Average TV viewing (-ve)
• Average book-reading
• Self-confidence according to attitude scale measurement
• Age (negative relationship, applies only in adulthood)
• Degree of authority in parental home (-ve)
• Criminality (-ve)
• Alcoholism (-ve)
• Mental disease (-ve)
• Emotional adaptation
"No single environmental factor seems to have a large influence on IQ. Variables widely believed to be important are usually weak....Even though many studies fail to find strong environmental effects....most of the factors studied do influence IQ in the direction predicted by the investigator....environmental effects are multifactorial and largely unrelated to each other."
So, it would appear that there are many psychological and biological factors each contributing a small a small fraction to the variance in IQ scores.

So, what can we say about nature vs. nurture as causal determinants of intelligence?:
"In the field of intelligence, there are three facts about the transmission of intelligence that virtually everyone seems to accept:

1. Both heredity and environment contribute to intelligence.
2. Heredity and environment interact in various ways.
3. Extremely poor as well as highly enriched environments can interfere with the realization of a person's intelligence, regardless of the person's heredity. Although most would accept a causal role of genetics, the exact genetic link and how it operates is very far from being understood - another point that most psychologists would agree on. It is certainly not a single gene, but a complex combination of smaller genetic markers.
5. But likewise, it is difficult to pin-down single, identifiable elements of the environment which directly influence IQ scores. Several environmental factors influence intelligence.

So what have we learned about intelligence: that it’s difficult to define but that there is SOMETHING we call intelligence that appears to relate to ability to reason abstractly, to learn and to adapt. That we can measure some part of it, although poorly; that it’s
partially caused by genetics, partially be environment; that the real causes are the complex, not well understood interplay between genetics and environment; that it is somewhat though not greatly modifiable; that sometimes what we learn from tests is used inappropriately but that IQ tests can be useful in helping children attain their potentia

World’s Most Intelligent People

It was really difficult to come up with a list of the most intelligent people because there are many of them, and it depends on your definition of intelligence. But I was able to list the top 5 that I think they are extraordinary people in terms of excellence and achievements.
Sir Isaac Newton:

This genius was born in 1642 and died in 1727, he was a mathematician and physicist and natural philosopher. Born at Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire, where he attended school, he entered Cambridge University in 1661; he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College in 1667. He formulated laws of universal gravitation and motion-laws that
isaacnewton

explain how objects move on Earth as well as through the heavens. If you ever taken a physics you would learn about his three popular laws, and you may hear the apply story that led him to discover the theory of force and gravity. He basically saw an apply fall in his orchard at some time during 1665 or 1666 that Newton conceived that the same force governed the motion of the Moon and the apple. He calculated the force needed to hold the Moon in its orbit, as compared with the force pulling an object to the ground. He also calculated the centripetal force needed to hold a stone in a sling, and the relation between the length of a pendulum and the time of its swing. These early explorations were not

soon exploited by Newton, though he studied astronomy and the problems of planetary motion.. Because he was cleaver in math, he invited the area of mathematics called calculus “used to be called method of fluxions“. While still a student, Newton read recent work on optics and light by the English physicists Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke; he also studied both the mathematics and the physics of the French philosopher and scientist René Descartes. All these amazing discoveries made his take our number one of the world’s most intelligent people.
Albert Einstein:

He is considered one of the greatest and most popular scientists of all time. He was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, albert-einsteinGermany, on March 14, 1879. After World War II, Einstein was a leading figure in the World Government Movement, he was offered the Presidency of the State of Israel, which he declined, and he collaborated with Dr. Chaim Weizmann in establishing the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At the start of his scientific work, Einstein realized the inadequacies of Newtonian mechanics and his special theory of relativity stemmed from an attempt to reconcile the laws of mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. He dealt with classical problems of statistical mechanics and problems in which they were merged with quantum theory: this led to an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules. He investigated the thermal properties of light with a low radiation density and his observations laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. Albert Einstein received honorary doctorate degrees in science, medicine and philosophy from many European and American universities. One last note, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics 1921.

charles-robert“I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.” You may have guessed who I am talking about; yes it’s the naturalist Charles Darwin who lived between 1809 -1882. Charles Robert Darwin was born on February 12, 1809 in Shrewsbury, England. Darwin was born on the same day as Abraham Lincoln. He was the fifth child and second son of Robert Waring Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood. Darwin was the British naturalist who became famous for his theories of evolution and natural selection. Like several scientists before him, Darwin believed all the life on earth evolved (developed gradually) over millions of years from a few common ancestors.

Socrates: (469-399)

despite his foundational place in the history of ideas, actually wrote nothing. Socrates wrote nothing because he felt that knowledge was a living, interactive thing. Socrates’ method of philosophical inquiry consisted in questioning socratespeople on the positions they asserted and working them through questions into a contradiction, thus proving to them that their original assertion was wrong. Socrates himself never takes a position; in The Apology he radically and skeptically claims to know nothing at all except that he knows nothing. Socrates and Plato refer to this method of questioning as elenchus , which means something like “cross-examination” The Socratic elenchus eventually gave rise to dialectic, the idea that truth needs to be pursued by modifying one’s position through questioning and conflict with opposing ideas. It is this idea of the truth being pursued, rather than discovered, that characterizes Socratic thought and much of our world view today. The Western notion of dialectic is somewhat Socratic in nature in that it is conceived of as an ongoing process. Although Socrates in The Apology claims to have discovered no other truth than that he knows no truth, the Socrates of Plato’s other earlier dialogues is of the opinion that truth is somehow attainable through this process of elenchus .
Leonardo Da Vinci 1452-1519:

A painter, a sculptor, an architect and an engineer, Leonardo Da Vinci’s numerous skills have earned him the title of renaissance master. Da Vinci’s fascination with science and his in-depth study of human anatomy aided him in mastering the realist art form. While Leonardo’s counterparts were known to create static figures in their works, leonardo-da-vinciLeonardo always tried to incorporate movement and expression into his own paintings. All the personages in his works are painted with great accuracy and detail that it is sometimes said that Da Vinci painted from the bones outward. Leonardo was and is best known as an artist, the creator of such masterpieces as the Mona Lisa, Madonna of the Rocks, and The Last Supper. Yet Leonardo was far more than a great artist: he had one of the best scientific minds of his time. He made painstaking observations and carried out research in fields ranging from architecture and civil engineering to astronomy to anatomy and zoology to geography, geology and paleontology. In the words of his biographer Giorgio Vasari. Leonardo knew well the rocks and fossils (mostly Cenozoic mollusks) found in his native north Italy. No doubt he had ample opportunity to observe them during his service as an engineer and artist at the court of Lodovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, from 1482 to 1499: Vasari wrote that “Leonardo was frequently occupied in the preparation of plans to remove mountains or to pierce them with tunnels from plain to plain.” He made many observations on mountains and rivers, and he grasped the principle that rocks can be formed by deposition of sediments by water, while at the same time the rivers erode rocks and carry their sediments to the sea, in a continuous grand cycle.

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT BRAIN

Brain is the central organ of the human body. It is extremely complex and sophisticated. The functions of the brain were found by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks in 400 BC. It was Hippocrates who first discovered that brain played an important role in sensation and intelligence. Nowadays, everyone understand the importance of having the brain, but most of us don’t know much about it, so here are some interesting facts for you.

(image credits: jepoirrier)

1) There are no pain receptors in the brain, so the brain can feel no pain.

2) The human brain is the fattest organ in the body and may consists of at least 60% fat.

3) Neurons develop at the rate of 250,000 neurons per minute during early pregnancy.

4) Humans continue to make new neurons throughout life in response to mental activity.

5) Alcohol interferes with brain processes by weakening connections between neurons.

6) Altitude makes the brain see strange visions – Many religions involve special visions that occurred at great heights. For example, Moses encountered a voice emanating from a burning bush on Mount Sinai and Muhammad was visited by an angel on Mount Hira. Similar phenomena are reported by mountain climbers, but they don’t think it’s very mystical. Many of the effects are attributable to the reduced supply of oxygen to the brain. At 8,000ft or higher, some mountaineers report perceiving unseen companions, seeing light emanating from themselves or others, seeing a second body like their own, and suddenly feeling emotions such as fear. Oxygen deprivation is likely to interfere with brain regions active in visual and face processing, and in emotional events.

7) Reading aloud and talking often to a young child promotes brain development.

8 ) Information travels at different speeds within different types of neurons. Not all neurons are the same. There are a few different types within the body and transmission along these different kinds can be as slow as 0.5 meters/sec or as fast as 120 meters/sec.

9) The capacity for such emotions as joy, happiness, fear, and shyness are already developed at birth. The specific type of nurturing a child receives shapes how these emotions are developed.

10) The left side of your brain (left hemisphere) controls the right side of your body; and, the right side of your brain (right hemisphere) controls the left side of your body.

11) Children who learn two languages before the age of five alters the brain structure and adults have a much denser gray matter.

12) Information can be processed as slowly as 0.5 meters/sec or as fast as 120 meters/sec (about 268 miles/hr).

13) While awake, your brain generates between 10 and 23 watts of power–or enough energy to power a light bulb.

14) The old adage of humans only using 10% of their brain is not true. Every part of the brain has a known function.

15) A study of one million students in New York showed that students who ate lunches that did not include artificial flavors, preservatives, and dyes did 14% better on IQ tests than students who ate lunches with these additives.

16) For years, scientists believed that tinnitus was due to a function within the mechanics of the ear, but newer evidence shows that it is actually a function of the brain.

17) Every time you recall a memory or have a new thought, you are creating a new connection in your brain.

18) Memories triggered by scent have a stronger emotional connection, therefore appear more intense than other memory triggers.

19) Each time we blink, our brain kicks in and keeps things illuminated so the whole world doesn’t go dark each time we blink (about 20,000 times a day).

20) Laughing at a joke is no simple task as it requires activity in five different areas of the brain.

21) The average number of thoughts that humans are believed to experience each day is 70,000.

22) There are two different schools of thought as to why we dream: the physiological school, and the psychological school. While many theories have been proposed, not single consensus has emerged as to why we dream. Some researchers suggest that dreams serve no real purpose, while other believe that dreaming is essential to mental, emotional and physical well-being. One theory for dreaming suggests dreams serve to clean up clutter from the mind.

23) The Hypothalamus part of the brain regulates body temperature much like a thermostat. The hypothalamus knows what temperature your body should be (about 98.6 Fahrenheit or 37 Celsius), and if your body is too hot, the hypothalamus tells it to sweat. If you’re too cold, the hypothalamus makes you start shivering. Shivering and sweating helps get your body’s temperature back to normal.

24) Approximately 85,000 neocortical neurons are lost each day in your brain. Fortunately, his goes unnoticed due to the built-in redundancies and the fact that even after three years this loss adds up to less than 1% of the total.

25) Differences in brain weight and size do not equal differences in mental ability. The weight of Albert Einstein’s brain was 1,230 grams that is less than an average weight of the human brain.

26) A living brain is so soft you could cut it with a table knife.

27) There are about 100,000 miles of blood vessels in the brain.

28) London taxi drivers ,famous for knowing all the London streets by heart, have a larger than normal hippocampus, especially the drivers who have been on the job longest. The study suggests that as people memorize more and more information, this part of their brain continues to grow.

29) The brain can live for 4 to 6 minutes without oxygen, and then it begins to die. No oxygen for 5 to 10 minutes will result in permanent brain damage.

30) Our brain often fools us. It often perceives things differently from the reality. Look at those pictures. Square A and B are actually the same shade of gray.

BAD HABITS--Progress Breaker

Days to Create Habit, 14 Days to Break the Habit
We all have vices, even though we may not all admit that we have them. Some people smoke, other people go shopping too much, and still others sit in front of their laptop every night eating a full bag of nacho chips while writing articles.
There's an old saying that it takes 7 days to create a habit and 14 days to break a habit. I don't know how true it is, but it does.I know we can start bad habits in 7 days or less, but breaking them is always harder.
Bad habits come in many forms and there are many factors to the bad habit. Determine the triggers of the bad habit first and foremost.
The first question you should ask when you plan to break a habit is how serious are you about breaking it? If you are really committed to getting rid of it, your chance of succeeding is much higher than if you lack this commitment. Be aware that breaking habits requires focused energy and you need to concentrate on observing your behaviour over a period of time.
In which situations are you performing the habit you want to get rid of. How often are you doing it and are there special things from your environment that trigger your behaviour? You should set aside a period of time just to observe yourself and your behaviour. Write down and keep track of when you do the unwanted behaviour. It is also important that you find out exactly what your thoughts and feelings are each time you perform your unwanted behaviour. When you write this down, you will be much more aware of when and why you perform this habit.
Now, take your notebook, read what you have written and ask yourself, "Which function has this habit for me? What does it really do for me? What pleasure does this habit give me? Which pain do I avoid with this behaviour? Does it prevent anxiety, stress, nausea? Does it make me feel more confident?
Think about this and write down some alternative behaviours to the habit you want to get rid of that would be a better and more positive way to handle the feelings or the situation that is associated with it. How can this new behaviour or new habit make you feel pleasure or prevent you from feeling pain as well as the old one. Select one or a few alternative behaviours or habits and start to practice them.
Be careful to observe your behaviour and as soon as you notice that you are practicing your old habit, stop yourself and start the new alternative behaviour you picked out previously. Work with this every day in the beginning one or two times a day, and increase it as the time goes by. To break an old habit and replace it with a new, isn't done overnight, but the more you practice your new behaviour, the more it becomes fixed and the more of the old one is erased.
Tell your family and friends that you are working with yourself to get rid of a habit you don't like, and they will probably help and support you in your endeavour to get rid of .
There are many ways to self improvement. Here are some tips for getting rid of a bad habit. Habits are as we all know some sort of automatic behaviours and most of us employ habits that are far from good, thus we want to change them. There are lots of examples; smoking habits, the habit of over-eating, the habit of forgetting certain things like umbrellas and gloves, the habit of interrupting other people when they talk etc.
Though there are many different bad habits, breaking a habit has certain things in common, whether it is a smoking habit, an over-eating habit or whatever. The tips below cover how to break a habit in general and can be applied on whichever habit you want to break.
The first question you should ask when you plan to break a habit is how serious are you about breaking it? If you are really committed to getting rid of it, your chance of succeeding is much higher than if you lack this commitment. Be aware that breaking habits requires focused energy and you need to concentrate on observing your behaviour over a period of time.
In which situations are you performing the habit you want to get rid of. How often are you doing it and are there special things from your environment that trigger your behaviour? You should set aside a period of time just to observe yourself and your behaviour. Write down and keep track of when you do the unwanted behaviour. It is also important that you find out exactly what your thoughts and feelings are each time you perform your unwanted behaviour. When you write this down, you will be much more aware of when and why you perform this habit.
Now, take your notebook, read what you have written and ask yourself, "Which function has this habit for me? What does it really do for me? What pleasure does this habit give me? Which pain do I avoid with this behaviour? Does it prevent anxiety, stress, nausea? Does it make me feel more confident?
Think about this and write down some alternative behaviours to the habit you want to get rid of that would be a better and more positive way to handle the feelings or the situation that is associated with it. How can this new behaviour or new habit make you feel pleasure or prevent you from feeling pain as well as the old one. Select one or a few alternative behaviours or habits and start to practice them.
Be careful to observe your behaviour and as soon as you notice that you are practicing your old habit, stop yourself and start the new alternative behaviour you picked out previously. Work with this every day in the beginning one or two times a day, and increase it as the time goes by. To break an old habit and replace it with a new, isn't done overnight, but the more you practice your new behaviour, the more it becomes fixed and the more of the old one is erased.
A - Analyze the Bad Habit
First, it is important to determine whether the undesired behavior is simply a bad habit or if it stems from an addiction. A habit is just an acquired pattern of behavior while an addiction includes psychological or physiological dependency. Keep in mind that if an addiction is present, as is often the case with tobacco or alcohol use, professional help may be necessary.
To successfully break a bad habit, it is essential to know when, where and why it occurs. Nail biting and other nervous habits, for instance, are often totally unconscious activities. Awareness of any nervous behavior may not reach the conscious mind until someone points it out. In order to successfully deal with undesirable behavior, establish when and where it is most likely to occur.
Once the behavior has been analyzed, a plan with specific steps to counter the behavior must be developed and put into place. Breaking a bad habit is possible but takes forethought and some clever strategizing. Dealing with an addiction, rather than just a habit, will be more difficult but these tips may still be of u

If you’re looking for ways how to get rid of bad habits and behaviors, this will be the perfect article for you. I’m going to share with you how you can ‘delete’ your bad habits and behaviors today.
You know, success is all about what you do in your life. And therefore, your habits and behaviors play important roles in it.
If you’re someone who procrastinate a lot and lazy to take action, you’ll never produce the results you want in your life. Your negative habits will not bring you the results you want.
As a result, you must start by adopting positive and empowering habits that will bring you what you want in your life.
To get rid of your negative habits, you must first understand what creates them.
Your habits are created by your thoughts. When you were born into this world, you have no habits. You pick up your habits from the influence from your surrounding and your own life experiences.
Your parents, your friends, your teachers, your boss, your peers… basically anyone can affect your habits by influencing your thoughts.
Once you have a certain thought in your mind, your mind will start to send signals to your emotion and hence you will take a certain set of action, which is your habits, to produce a certain results.
And after you’ve got the results, you’ll reinforce the thoughts in your mind.
For example, what will you do if I give you $100 right now? It depends on your habit toward the extra money. Some people will use to buy something they love, some people will buy meals, and some people will save or invest it.
When you invest the money, you’ll feel satisfy. This feeling of satisfaction will reinforce your brain and that next time if you ever receive any extra money, you’ll invest it as well.
On the other hand, if you spend the money to buy something that you desire, the instant gratification will also help to reinforce the thoughts in your mind.
Unless something ‘bad’ happened, you’ll keep on cycling the same pattern over and over again.
What I mean is, if you want to change your habit, you must create a new thought and emotion in your mind to replace the existing pattern.
It is not like computer, which you can simply press on the delete button to delete away files that you don’t want. Your mind works differently in ‘deleting’ negative thoughts or habits that you don’t want.
Like what I mentioned above, if you want to get rid of your negative habits and behaviors, you’ll have to start by replacing your old patterns with new ones.
Take back the previous example. If you spend the $100 I give you into gambling, and you lose them all, will this result help you to better manage your extra money you get in the future? Of course it would.
Conversely, if you invest the $100 into something, and you earn an extra $100 from it, which now you have $200 at your hand, you’ll definitely create a strong emotion and thought pattern into your mind about investing.
You’ll most likely to invest any extra money I give you in the future. This is how you can change your habits and behaviors.
Some people procrastinate all the time. They choose to watch TV instead of investing their time into reading development books. They get instant gratification of feeling joy when watching TV. This will reinforce their thought pattern that watching TV is good and reading books is something they don’t like.
This cycle will keep on going until one day, something forces them to change. Such as if they did not change their habits, they’ll be in dept. When this happen, they’ll forces themselves to take different set of action that will lead to different results.
And if they get positive results, they’ll form a new thought pattern and new habits for themselves.
This is exactly how your mind works and how your habits can be formed and replaced with new and empowering ones.
So start by noticing your old thinking patterns that lead you to a certain habit.
After that, try to create a new thinking by asking empowering questions and focus on positive thoughts. When you do this, you’ll feel the difference. Take action that will lead you to the results you want immediately.
Once you have taken the action, you’ll get the results you want and you’ll create change in your mind, or reinforce your thought pattern.
This is the real art of how to get rid of bad habits and behaviors.

SLEEP AND MEMORY

Why do we need sleep?

A lot of research and theories have been thrown up over the years. Scientists have shown numerous ways in which sleep is related to memory. Working memory was shown to be affected by sleep deprivation. Working memory is important because it keeps information active for further processing and supports higher-level cognitive functions such as decision making, reasoning, and episodic memory. As the field of sleep research is still relatively new, scientists have yet to determine exactly why people sleep. However, they do know that humans must sleep and, in fact, people can survive longer without food than without sleep. And people are not alone in this need – all mammals, reptiles and birds sleep.
Scientists have proposed the following theories on why humans require sleep:
• Sleep may be a way of recharging the brain. The brain has a chance to shut down and repair neurons and to exercise important neuronal connections that might otherwise deteriorate due to lack of activity.
• Sleep gives the brain an opportunity to reorganize data to help find a solution to problem, process newly learned information and organize and archive memories.
• Sleep lowers a person’s metabolic rate and energy consumption.
• The cardiovascular system also gets a break during sleep.
• During sleep, the body has a chance to replace chemicals and repair muscles, other tissues and aging or dead cells.
• In children and young adults, growth hormones are released during deep sleep.
• When a person falls asleep and wakes up is largely determined by his or her circadian rhythm, a day-night cycle of about 24 hours. Circadian rhythms greatly influence the timing, amount and quality of sleep. In these respects sleep conserves much energy in such mammals, particularly as sleep can also develop into a torpor, whereby metabolic rate drops significantly for a few hours during the sleep period. On the other hand, humans can usually rest and relax quite adequately during wakefulness, and there is only a modest further energy saving to be gained by sleeping.
Certainly a number of studies have shown that animals and humans deprived of sleep do not perform well on memory tasks.
The effect of sleep on memory and learning
Some memory tasks are more affected be sleep deprivation than others. A recent study, for example, found that recognition memory for faces was unaffected by people being deprived of sleep for 35 hours. However, while the sleep-deprived people remembered that the faces were familiar, they did have much more difficulty remembering in which of two sets of photos the faces had appeared. In other words, their memory for the context of the faces was significantly worse.
While large doses of caffeine reduced the feelings of sleepiness and improved the ability of the sleep-deprived person
These results indicate that sleep deprivation affects different cognitive tasks in different ways, and also that parts of the brain are able to at least partially compensate for the effects of sleep deprivation.
Sleep deprivation mimics aging?
A report in the medical journal The Lancet, said that cutting back from the standard eight down to four hours of sleep each night produced striking changes in glucose tolerance and endocrine function that mimicked many of the hallmarks of aging. Dr Eve Van Cauter, professor of medicine at the University of Chicago and director of the study, said, "We suspect that chronic sleep loss may not only hasten the onset but could also increase the severity of age-related ailments such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity and memory loss."
Is sleep necessary to consolidate memories?
This is the big question, still being argued by the researchers. . Most of the research favoring sleep’s importance in consolidation has used procedural / skill memory — sequences of actions.
From this research, it does seem that it is the act of sleep itself, not simply the passage of time, that is critical to convert new memories into long-term memory codes.
What sleep does for memory
The findings reinforce the hypothesis that sleep is needed to clear the brain's short-term memory storage and make room for new information.
Sleep helps reduce errors in memory
A study in which college students were shown lists of words and then, 12 hours later, asked to identify which words they had seen or heard earlier, found that those who trained at night and tested the following morning were less prone to falsely recognizing semantically similar words than those who trained in the morning and tested in the evening. It’s suspected that sleep may help strengthen the source of the memory, thus helping protect against false
Memories practiced throughout the day, not just while sleeping
A study investigating the role of sleep in creative problem-solving has found that those who experienced REM sleep between two tests performed significantly better on the later test compared to those who simply had a quiet rest, or those who napped but had no REM sleep. The findings support the idea that REM sleep (when dreams occur) has a role in forming new associations. It’s suggested that the process may be facilitated by changes to neurotransmitter systems (cholinergic and noradrenergic) during REM sleep.
Sleep may be important in regulating emotional responses
The findings suggest that the sleeping brain calculates what is most important about an experience and selects only what is adaptive for consolidation .
Sleep may help clear the brain for new learning sleep effects on the human brain. In a recent study have revealed that during sleep the number of new synapses formed during earlier learning decreased. It’s theorised that this activity during sleep is a way of pruning the less relevant and important synapses (clearing away the junk, as it has been conceptualised). Research showing that more learning resulted in longer sleep. It also supports recent Researcher also found synaptic strength increases during the day, then weakens during sleep. The study also identified three genes essential to the links between learning and increased need for sleep.
Sleep helps you learn complicated tasks & recover forgotten The findings indicate that although people may appear to forget much of their learning over the course of a day, a night’s sleep will restore it; moreover, sleep protected the memory from loss over the course of the next day. The findings confirm the role of sleep in consolidating memory for skills, and extends the research to complicated tasks.
Sleep selectively preserves emotional memories
It’s now generally accepted that sleep plays an important role in consolidating memories, A new study has found that sleep had an effect on emotional aspects of a memory. The findings are consistent with the view that the individual components of emotional memory become 'unbound' during sleep, enabling the brain to selectively preserve only that informationit
Aging impairs the 'replay' of memories during sleep
During sleep, the hippocampus repeatedly "replays" brain activity from recent experiences, in a process believed to be important for memory sleep.
A nap can help you learn
Studies show that short period sleep can help you learn.
Brain connections strengthen during waking hours, weaken during sleep
New research provides support for a much-debated theory that we need sleep to give our synapses time to rest and recover. The human brain is said to expend up to 80% of its energy on synaptic activity, constantly adding and strengthening connections in respoat nse to stimulation. The researchers have theorized that we need an ‘off-line period’, when we are not exposed to the environment, to take synapses down. .Study has revealed that synapses — the all-important points of connection between neurons — are very active when the animal is awake and very quiet during sleep. The researchers feel that these findings support the idea that our brain circuits get progressively stronger during wakefulness and that sleep helps to recalibrate them to a sustainable baseline. .n stronger.
Following on from research showing long-term memory is consolidated during sleep through the replaying of recently encoded experiences, a study has found that the particular order in which they were experienced is also strengthened, probably by a replay of the experiences in "forward" direction. The study involved students being asked to learn triplets of words presented one after the other. Those whose recall of the order of the words was tested after sleep showed better recall, but only when they were asked to reproduce the learned words in forward direction.
Sleep protects against interference
A study involving 48 people (aged 18—30) found that those who learned 20 pairs of words at 9pm and were tested at 9am the following morning, after a night’s sleep, performed better than those who learned them at 9am and were tested at 9pm of the same day. Moreover, for those who were given a second list of word pairs to remember just before testing, where the first word in each pair was the same as on the earlier list, the advantage of sleep was dramatically better. For those who experienced the interference manipulation, those in the sleep group recalled 12% more word pairs than the wake group, but with interference, the recall rate was 44% higher for the sleep group.

Sleeping helps us put facts together
And in yet another sleep study, researchers found evidence that sleep also helps us see the big picture.
Asleep or awake we retain memory
How sleep improves memory
While previous research has been conflicting, it does now seem clear that sleep consolidates learning of motor skills in particular. A new imaging study involving 12 young adults taught a sequence of skilled finger movements has found a dramatic shift in activity pattern when doing the task in those who were allowed to sleep during the 12 hour period before testing. Increased activity was found in the right primary motor cortex, medial prefrontal lobe, hippocampus and left cerebellum — this is assumed to support faster and more accurate motor output. Decreased activity was found in the parietal cortices, the left insular cortex, temporal pole and fronto-polar region — these are assumed to reflect less anxiety and a reduced need for conscious spatial monitoring. It’s suggested that this is one reason why infants need so much sleep — motor skill learning is a high priority at this age. The findings may also have implications for stroke patients and others who have suffered brain injuiries.
Sleep helps insight
A new German study provides evidence for what we all suspected — “sleeping on” a problem can really work. In the study, participants were given a mathematical puzzle to solve; a puzzle which could be solved by trial-by-trial learning, or almost immediately if participants grasped the hidden rule. After training in the trial-by-trial learning, some of the participants were allowed to sleep through the night, while others were prevented from sleeping. When they returned to the problem eight hours later, those that had slept were twice as likely to realize the rule. Another group that trained in the morning, and were then tested later that day, were also slower at finding the rule, suggesting that the slowness was not solely due to fatigue. Sleep did not, however, help participants who had not had the initial training. It is suggested that sleep can act to restructure new memory representations.

Stages of memory clarified in sleep studies
Two new studies add to our understanding of the effects of sleep on memory. Both studies involved young adults and procedural (skill) learning, and found temporary declines in performance in particular contexts (a brief description of these studies is given here). On the basis of these studies, researchers identified three stages of memory processing: the first stage of memory — its stabilization — seems to take around six hours. During this period, the memory appears particularly vulnerable to being “lost”. The second stage of memory processing — consolidation — occurs during sleep. The third and final stage is the recall phase, when the memory is once again ready to be accessed and re-edited. (see my article on consolidation for more explanation of the processes of consolidation and re-consolidation). The surprising aspect to this is the time it appears to take for memories to initially stabilize. The studies also confirm the role of sleep in the consolidation
New motor skills consolidated during sleep
An imaging study that sheds light on the gain in performance observed during the day after learning a new task. Following training in a motor skill, certain brain areas appear to be reactived during REM sleep, resulting in an optimization of the network that subtends the subject's visuo–motor response.

Deep "slow wave" sleep necessary to consolidate memories
Sleep is necessary to consolidate memories. Remembering a new task is more difficult if you don't sleep within 30 hours of learning the task. "Catch-up" sleep on subsequent nights doesn't make up for losing that first night's sleep. Moreover, it appears that the deep "slow wave" sleep that occurs in the first half of the night is the type of sleep necessary to consolidate memories. Other types of memory however, may require "REM" sleep (that occurs while you are dreaming).
What sleep does for memory
A midday nap markedly boosts the brain's learning capacity
Following on from research showing that pulling an all-nighter decreases the ability to cram in new facts by nearly 40%, a study involving 39 young adults has found that those given a 90-minute nap in the early afternoon, after being subjected to a rigorous learning task, did markedly better at later round of learning exercises, compared to those who remained awake throughout the day. The former group actually improved in their capacity to learn, while the latter became worse at learning. The findings reinforce the hypothesis that sleep iYs needed to clear the brain's short-term memory storage and make room for new information. Moreover, this refreshing of memory capacity was related to Stage 2 non-REM sleep (an intermediate stage between deep sleep and the REM dream stage).

Helping memory consolidation while you sleep
The role of sleep in consolidating new learning is now well-established, but now a study intriguingly reveals that you can improve that learning by playing sounds associated with the learning while you are asleep.
How sleep consolidates memory
A rat study provides clear evidence that "sharp wave ripples", brainwaves that occur in the hippocampus when it is "off-line", most often during stage four sleep, are responsible for consolidating memory and transferring the learned information from the hippocampus to the neocortex, where long-term memories are stored. The study found that when these waves were eliminated during sleep, the rats were less able to remember a spatial navigation task.

Sleep may help clear the brain for new learning
Sleep helps you learn complicated tasks & recover forgotten skills
Sleep selectively preserves emotional memories
Aging impairs the 'replay' of memories during sleep
During sleep, the hippocampus repeatedly "replays" brain activity from recent experiences, in a process believed to be important for memory consolidation. A new rat study has found reduced replay activity during sleep in old compared to young rats, and rats with the least replay activity performed the worst in tests of spatial memory.
Sleep reinforces the temporal sequence in memory
Sleep,protects,against,interference

Sleeping helps us put facts together
And in yet another sleep study, researchers found evidence that sleep also helps us see the big picture. .
Sleep makes memories resistant to interference
Asleep or awake we retain memory
Mentally, sleep may be as active a state as waking state
Why do we sleep? A question we keep asking. Recent research leads us another step in the road. The study has identified a number of genes upregulated specifically during sleep – at least as many as are turned on while we are awake. These "sleep genes" largely fall into four categories: genes involved in synaptic plasticity (supporting the view that sleep aids memory consolidation); genes underlying translation (supporting observations that protein synthesis increases during sleep); genes regulating membrane and vesicle trafficking; and genes for synthesizing cholesterol (which may be crucial for synapse formation and maintenance, which could, in turn, enhance neural plasticity (the brain's ability to change and learn)). The study also found, to the researchers’ surprise, that the cerebellum showed largely the same pattern of gene-expression during sleep as the cortex.
Sleep can act to restructure new memory
Napping reverses information overload
Improving motor skills through sleep


New motor skills consolidated during sleep
Deep "slow wave" sleep necessary to consolidate memories
"Our previous studies demonstrated that a period of sleep could help people improve their performance of 'memory tasks.
these finger movements while an MRI measured the activity of their brain.
"The cerebellum, which functions as one of the brain's motor centers controlling speed and accuracy, was clearly more active when the subjects had had a night of sleep," he explains. At the same time, the MRIs showed reduced activity in the brain's limbic system, the region that controls for emotions, such as stress and anxiety.
"The MRI scans are showing us that brain regions shift dramatically during sleep," says Walker. "When you're asleep, it seems as though you are shifting memory to more efficient storage regions within the brain. Consequently, when you awaken, memory tasks can be performed both . accomplished.
This new research may explain why children and teenagers need more sleep than adults and, in particular, why infants sleep almost round the clock.
"Sleep appears to play a key role in human development," says Walker. "At 12 months of age, infants are in an almost constant state of motor skill learning, coordinating their limbs and digits in a variety of routines. They have an immense amount of new material to consolidate and, consequently, this intensive period of learning may demand a great deal of sleep."
The new findings may also prove to be important to patients who have suffered brain injuries, for example, stroke patients, who have to re-learn language, limb control, etc.
"Perhaps sleep will prove to be another critical factor in a stroke patient's rehabilitation," he notes, adding that in the future he and his colleagues plan to examine sleep disorders and memory disorders to determine if there is a reciprocal relationship between the two.
"If you look at modern society, there has in recent years been a considerable erosion of sleep time.Busy individuals often shortchange their sleep during the week -- purging, if you will -- only to try to catch up by "binging" on sleep on the weekends.
"This is especially troubling considering it is happening not just among adults, but also among teenagers and children," he adds. "Our research is demonstrating that sleep is critical for improving and consolidating procedural skills and that you can't short-change your brain of sleep and still learn effectively."
This study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Dana Foundation.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a patient care, teaching and research affiliate of Harvard Medical School, and ranks third in National Institutes of Health funding among independent hospitals nationwide. BIDMC is clinically affiliated with the Joslin Diabetes Center and is a research partner of Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. BIDMC is the official hospital of the Boston Red Sox. For more information, visit www.bidmc.harvard.edu.
"Let me sleep on it" may just be the right advice for remembering complex information. Getting a good night's rest not only helps retention, but may even help us recall thoughts forgotten during the day, according to researchers from the University of Chicago.
Howard Nusbaum, a professor of psychology at the university, studied the effects of sleep on memory by testing the retention of words. Using a synthesizer, he distorted tapes of recorded speech, making the words difficult to understand. He then played the tapes back to college students, asking them to decipher the speech.
On first exposure, students understood just 21 percent of the words. After an hour of training, they understood 54 percent. "It is something like learning how to understand someone with a foreign accent," explains Nusbaum.
He then ran the same experiment with a second group of students, who were tested first at 9 in the morning and then tested again at 9 that night. This group remembered only remembered 31 percent of the words in the test at the end of the day. Yet after a night of sleep, their scores climbed up again: the following morning, the same students remembered 40 percent of the words.Top of Form


A third group was tested at 9:00 in the evening, then again the next morning. Their retention was also 40 percent.
Apparently, in the process of cleaning up our scattered thoughts, sleep also finds the ones that were about to slip through the cracks. "Sleep might strengthen relevant associations and weaken irrelevant associations, improving access to memories," Nusbaum notes.


The Learning Process and Sleep

Healthy sleep is essential for optimal learning and memory function.
Sleep, learning, and memory are complex phenomena that are not entirely understood. However, animal and human studies suggest that the quantity and quality of sleep have a profound impact on learning and memory. Research suggests that sleep helps learning and memory in two distinct ways. First, a sleep-deprived person cannot focus attention optimally and therefore cannot learn efficiently. Second, sleep itself has a role in the consolidation of memory, which is essential for learning new information.

Although the exact mechanisms are not known, learning and memory are often described in terms of three functions. Acquisition refers to the introduction of new information into the brain. Consolidation represents the processes by which a memory becomes stable. Recall refers to the ability to access the information (whether consciously or unconsciously) after it has been stored.

Each of these steps is necessary for proper memory function. Acquisition and recall occur only during wakefulness, but research suggests that memory consolidation takes place during sleep through the strengthening of the neural connections that form our memories. Although there is no consensus about how sleep makes this process possible, many researchers think that specific characteristics of brainwaves during different stages of sleep are associated with the formation of particular types of memory.

Sleep, Learning, and Memory
Sleep researchers study the role of sleep in learning and memory formation in two ways. The first approach looks at the different stages of sleep (and changes in their duration) in response to learning a variety of new tasks. The second approach examines how sleep deprivation affects learning. Sleep deprivation can be total (no sleep allowed), partial (either early or late sleep is deprived), or selective (specific stages of sleep are deprived).
Sleep Stages and Types of Memory
Different types of memories are formed in new learning situations. Scientists are exploring whether there is a relationship between the consolidation of different types of memories and the various stages of sleep.
The earliest sleep and memory research focused on declarative memory, which is the knowledge of fact-based information, or "what" we know . In one research study, individuals engaged in an intensive language course were observed to have an increase in rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM sleep. This is a stage of sleep in which dreaming occurs most frequently. Scientists hypothesized that REM sleep played an essential role in the acquisition of learned material. Further studies have suggested that REM sleep seems to be involved in declarative memory processes if the information is complex and emotionally charged, but probably not if the information is simple and emotionally neutral.

Researchers now hypothesize that slow-wave sleep (SWS), which is deep, restorative sleep, also plays a significant role in declarative memory by processing and consolidating newly acquired information. Studies of the connection between sleep and declarative memory have had mixed results, and this is an area of continued research.
Sleep plays a major role in the ability to learn new tasks that require motor coordination and performance.
Research has also focused on sleep and its role in procedural memory—the remembering "how" to do something (for example, riding a bicycle or playing the piano). REM sleep seems to plays a critical role in the consolidation of procedural memory. Other aspects of sleep also play a role: motor learning seems to depend on the amount of lighter stages of sleep, while certain types of visual learning seem to depend on the amount and timing of both deep, slow-wave sleep (SWS) and REM sleep
The Impact of Sleep Deprivation on Learning and Performance lack of adequate sleep has on learning and memory. When we are sleep deprived, our focus, attention, and vigilance drift, making it more difficult to receive information. Without adequate sleep and rest, over-worked neurons can no longer function to coordinate information properly, and we lose our ability to access previously learned information.

In addition, our interpretation of events may be affected. We lose our ability to make sound decisions because we can no longer accurately assess the situation, plan accordingly, and choose the correct behavior. Judgment becomes impaired.

Being chronically tired to the point of fatigue or exhaustion means that we are less likely to perform well. Neurons do not fire optimally, muscles are not rested, and the body’s organ systems are not synchronized. Lapses in focus from sleep deprivation can even result in accidents or injury.

For more information about how sleep deprivation affects performance, see Sleep, Performance, and Public Safety.

Low-quality sleep and sleep deprivation also negatively impact mood, which has consequences for learning. Alterations in mood affect our ability to acquire new information and subsequently to remember that information. Although chronic sleep deprivation affects different individuals in a variety of ways (and the effects are not entirely known), it is clear that a good night’s rest has a strong impact on learning and memory.
Open Questions
Although current research suggests that sleep is essential for proper memory function, there are unanswered questions, as in any area of active scientific inquiry. For example,
Not all researchers are convinced that sleep plays as prominent a role in memory consolidation as others believe. In experiments in which animals completed a course through a complicated maze, the animals' amount of REM sleep increased after performing the task. Some researchers believe that the increase in REM sleep reflects an increased demand on the brain processes that are involved in learning a new task. Other researchers, however, have suggested that any changes in the amount of REM sleep are due to the stress of the task itself, rather than a functional relationship to learning.

Researchers are likewise split with regard to the impact of sleep deprivation on learning and memory. For example, rats often perform much worse on learning tasks after being selectively deprived of REM sleep. This suggests that REM sleep is necessary for the animals’ ability to consolidate the memory of how to perform the task. Some scientists have argued that the observed differences in learning are not actually due to the lack of REM sleep, but may be due to the animals not being as well rested because they were deprived a portion of their sleep.


We still don't know the exact mechanism of the memory process that occurs during sleep, but the results of this research suggest the possibility that it is possible to speed up memory consolidation, and in the future, we may be able to do it artificially," said Prof. Karni.
Long term memory is defined as a permanent memory that doesn't disappear or that disappears after many years. This part of our memory is divided into two types – memories of "what" (for example: what happened yesterday or what one remembers from an article one read yesterday) and memories of "how to" (for example: how to read Hebrew, how to drive, play basketball or play the piano).
Two groups of participants in the study practiced a repeated motor activity which consisted of bringing the thumb and a finger together at a specific sequence. The research examined the "how" aspect of memory in the participants' ability to perform the task quickly and in the correct sequence. One of the groups was allowed to nap for an hour and a half after learning the task while the other group stayed awake.
The group that slept in the afternoon showed a distinct improvement in their task performance by that evening, as opposed to the group that stayed awake, which did not exhibit any improvement. Following an entire night's sleep, both groups exhibited the same skill level. "This part of the research showed that a daytime nap speeds up performance improvement in the brain. After a night's sleep the two groups were at the same level, but the group that slept in the afternoon improved much faster than the group that stayed awake,"
A second experiment showed that another aspect of memory consolidation is accelerated by sleep. It was previously shown that during the 6-8 hours after completing an effective practice session, the neural process of "how" memory consolidation is susceptible to interference, such that if, for example, one learns or performs a second, different task, one's brain will not be able to successfully remember the first trained task.
of their performance, as if there had been no interference at all.
"This part of the study demonstrated, for the first time, that daytime sleep can shorten the time "how to" memory becomes immune to interference and forgetting. Instead of 6-8 hours, the brain consolidated the memory during the 90 minute nap," explains Prof. Karni who added that while this study demonstrates that the process of memory consolidation is accelerated during daytime sleep, it is still not clear which mechanisms sleep accelerates in the process.
The elucidation of these mechanisms, say the researchers, could enable the development of methods to accelerate memory consolidation in adults and to create stable memories in a short time. Until then, if you need to memorize something quickly or if your schedule is filled with different activities which require learning "how" to do things, it is worth finding the time for an afternoon nap.
Source: University of Haifa

There are a number of theories about why we sleep and what happens in our bodies and brains during sleep cycles. However, there is not currently one predominant theory. It is quite possible that there is a kernel of truth in each of these theories; that they will all work together eventually to inform a more complete understanding of human sleep.
Most scientists agree that one of the major purposes of sleep is to restore and heal the body. It has been observed that hormone and immune functions change during specific stages of the sleep cycle. Furthermore, some studies have shown that sleep deprivation can lead to deficiencies in the immune system. Although it is believed by some that important growth can take place during sleep, there have been no studies to show that the lack of sleep can halt or stunt growth.
It has also been hypothesized that sleep offers important restoration to the brain. It is possible that neurons are restored, that brain proteins and certain hormones are produced. Some scientists believe that sleep is particularly important to the brains in young humans.
A completely alternate theory to those described above is the “Preservation and Protection” theory of sleep. This theory asserts that human beings do not require the full 24 hour period within each day to satisfy basic needs such as collecting necessary food and supplies, eating, and reproducing. As not all 24 hours are required, sleep offers a time of rest when humans are not out in the elements, and therefore exposed to threats.