You may wonder how it is possible to dream and to learn while simply lying in your bed and sleeping. But while your consciousness is relaxing, your subconscious is busy thinking and understanding. So improving the quality of your sleep is a simple, natural way of also improving your ability to learn.
Last-minute cramming and studying the night before the exam could help you to pass. But if you really want to remember what you’ve learned, the best idea is to get a good night’s sleep before the exam. A study carried out at Harvard Medical School in the US has shown that the best way of remembering what we have learned is to let our brains help us to rehearse and learn by sleeping for at least eight hours after taking in the information.
When we sleep, we go through different stages of sleep. Deep sleep and REM sleep – also known as dream sleep –
are two of the most important stages in terms of our ability to learn. During deep sleep, our knowledge is cemented and our impressions are enhanced, allowing us to remember what we have learned for longer. REM sleep, during which we undergo rapid eye movements, has proven to be important for learning processes and behaviour. Quite simply, while we dream we carry on with what we have learned during the daytime. Deep sleep tends to be concentrated during the first part of our sleep, whereas we have more periods of REM sleep towards the end of the night.
The Harvard Medical School studies show that the learning process continues not only during the night after you have learnt something, but also continues as the brain processes the information while we sleep over the next few nights. After three nights of good sleep, the brain has trained the memory to the maximum, allowing you to perform at your very best.