A recent Nature article describing sleep studies suggests that your ability to learn has a less to do with the amount of sleep, and more to do with the kind of sleep you get – specifically deep sleep. This might seem obvious, but the findings are interesting nonetheless.

In the article, deep sleep is defined as sleep where slow wave activity is high, and alpha wave activity is low. In one of the studies, each participant slept about 7 hours. Those in the “shallow” group experienced about 20 minutes more high alpha wave sleep per night than those in the “normal” group (meaning “normal” sleepers had more deep sleep).

The “normal” sleepers, during an image memorization task, showed higher levels of activity in their hippocampus. The “shallow” sleepers showed less activity during the same task. Participants’ memory was tested a day after the memorization task. Those who had shallow sleep the night before their memorization task scored lower on the subsequent memory test than those who had deep sleep.

In my own words: deep sleep is good for learning.

So now I’m curious – how well do I do when playing a game in Grockit after a night of poor sleep (an admittedly subjective designation) compared to a night of good sleep?

How about you? How do your “good sleep” vs. “bad sleep” sessions compare?

Thanks to The British Psychological Research Society blog for their own write up on the article, where I found first found the original Nature article.

Photo by Mayr