Ibraheem Solaiman

English 110

Sarah Jacobson

10 November 2022

It’s no secret that sleep is essential to our health. Our bodies need rest in order to function, and so do our brains. Sleep is essential to our cognitive functions, yet despite this a large portion of us do not get the proper amount of sleep. Arguably one of the most sleep deprived demographics would be students, who, due to several factors like overwhelming workload or poor time management, get significantly less sleep than they actually need. The majority of high school and college students are not getting a healthy amount of sleep, and this can be detrimental to many aspects of their lives, including their performance as students. Exactly how harmful are those late nights spent cramming for a test or finishing homework, or even just watching YouTube? Does that impair a student’s ability to learn and retain information? And if so to what extent? Most students probably don’t know what kind of damage losing sleep does to them and could be practicing healthier habits to improve many avenues of their lives. So, in what ways does losing sleep affect a student’s learning?

To understand how sleep affects learning, it is essential to understand the connection between sleep and memory.  Many people may experience difficulty with remembering information when sleep deprived; this is because the brain does not have enough time to create new pathways for recent information. According to an article by Sleep Foundation, the first three stages of sleep, “prepare your brain to learn new information the following day. Not sleeping or getting enough sleep can lower your learning abilities by as much as 40%”(Pacheco). For context, a sleep cycle has four stages, the first two being light NREM(non-rapid eye movement) , then deep NREM sleep, and finally REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. The NREM stages are when a person’s brain filters through a day’s memories. Consequently, if a student is not experiencing the proper sleep cycle, their retention of new information will decrease significantly. This means that unfortunately, losing sleep to learn topics the night before an exam will not help you remember the information, let alone master the content. Furthermore, according to a report published by the public library of science, “post learning sleep”, can be incredibly helpful in consolidating newly learned information. This means studied information is easier to remember after a night of sleep than after a full day of staying awake. According to the report, “the memory benefits of sleep are enhanced for restudied information, but only when sleep occurs soon after learning”(Ashton 3). This is based on a study detailed in the report in which participants were asked to recall information after intervals of sleep. As the study suggests, as well as sleep foundation’s article, sleep is essential to consolidating memories and losing sleep can severely impact the ability to impact studied information. However, it should be noted that the exact roles that each stage of sleep play in learning isn’t clear to scientists, these studies merely observe trends and make broad statements. That doesn’t change the fact that a correlation does indeed exist.

The connection between learning and sleep can also be better understood by observing patterns in student’s grades in relation to their sleeping habits. An article on MIT news describes what professors say is an obvious correlation between the average amount of sleep a student got and their quiz grades. The study was initially about the connection between fitness and student grades; however, the professors quickly noticed a clear correlation between sleep patterns and student performance, describing, “[An] essentially straight-line relationship between the average amount of sleep a student got and their grades on the 11 quizzes, three midterms, and final exam, with the grades ranging from A’s to C’s”(Chandler).  It should be noted that this doesn’t necessarily indicate a causality between sleep and grades, as there could be some other factor impacting both, but the results, “are a strong indication, Grossman says, that sleep ‘really, really matters’” (Chandler). Interestingly, the study also revealed that the sleep students get the night before an exam has little impact on their performance, what’s more important is getting good sleep on the days they’re learning. This corroborates the claims made in my previous source from the Public Library of Science. Furthermore, consistency also appears to play a role; as opposed to getting a good night of sleep the night before, it’s more beneficial to practice consistent sleep patterns because “those who got relatively consistent amounts of sleep each night did better than those who had greater variations from one night to the next, even if they ended up with the same average amount” (Chandler). The article goes on to make a number of observations, but the gist is that better sleep correlates to better grades, and although that doesn’t tell us of the exact physiological effects of sleep deprivation, it reaffirms the fact that the connection exists.    

It is also important to acknowledge how sleep affects children, as the early developmental years are when we do the most learning. Children, especially those at early school age, must consolidate high quantities of new information every day, so understanding how sleep affects them is essential to understanding the connection between learning and sleep.  In a scientific report published by nature.com, scientists performed retention tests on children and adults, the sessions being separated by either a sleep or wake condition. The focus of the report was on post learning slow-wave sleep, or SWS, which is apparently known to support memory consolidation. According to the report, “[a]s SWS is more abundant in young population, we suggested that sleep-dependent memory consolidation processes could occur at a faster pace in school-aged children” (Peiffer 1). The study revealed that although the wakeful stages of the experiment showed no differences that could be attributed to age, “sleep led to stabilized memory retrieval performance only in children, not in adults” (Peiffer 1). What this tells us is that, “more efficient sleep-dependent declarative memory consolidation processes in children compared with adults, an effect potentially ascribed to more abundant and deeper SWS during childhood” (Peiffer 3). Essentially saying that because children experience more slow wave sleep, sleep benefitted them more in terms of learning and remembering new information when compared to adults. The age in which we do the most learning is also when sleep is the most beneficial to said learning, and the results of the study also corroborate the idea of sleeping after learning introduced in previous sources.  

 A similar analysis of the effects of sleep deprivation was published by the New York Times titled The Sleep Debt Collector is Here, by Oliver Whang of the New York Times Health Column. The essay discusses the effects of sleep deprivation on the brain in general, rather than focus on a specific function. The essay has a professional tone, but is written for general audiences, so it presents its scientific evidence using digestible language. Whang begins by describing sleep deprivation in ways that would be relatable to readers, like the feelings of grogginess after a restless night, and transitions into a more in depth and physiological analysis. Throughout the essay, Whang cites numerous different medical studies that used different methods to evaluate the connection between sleep deprivation and brain function. He explains how these different studies corroborate each other and add on to our understanding of sleep and the brain, in order to convey to readers how exactly they are being affected by the loss of sleep. Although Whang focused on studies performed on animals to then make inferences about humans, the studies present the same ideas and largely coincide with the findings of the studies on people presented earlier. Whang also has the same purpose with these studies, which is to help himself as well as readers better understand how sleep affects them in order to practice healthier habits.

Although the specifics of how sleep affects learning on a physiological level aren’t completely clear, as there are still many points of contention that need to be further researched, studies undeniably confirm that sleep and learning are correlated. Essentially, losing sleep prevents your brain from being able to properly consolidate newly learned information, and the best way to retain said information is to get consistent sleep, specifically after the information is learned. School performance and sleep have been proven to have a direct relationship based on studies performed on students, and the role sleep plays in memory storage has been researched extensively, so sleep deprivation undeniably impairs our ability to learn and retain information. Furthermore, it is the consistency of healthy sleep habits that is essential to learning, rather than treating sleep as something that can be made up. However, there are still many unanswered questions, like what particular stage of sleep is responsible for memory consolidation or which stage facilitates learning. However, the scientific community has a good understanding of the basic principles of that relationship.