14 Preliminaries
to tell you to go to bed, lots of things to do, and of course you’re inclassduring the day and then
you study, so late night is when you have fun. Unfortunately, learning is clearly correlated with
engagement, activity, and mental alertness, and all of these tend to shut down when you’re tired.
Furthermore, the formation oflong term memory of any kindfrom a day’s experiences has been
shown in both animal and human studies todependon the brain undergoing at least a few natural
sleep cycles of deep sleep alternating with REM (Rapid Eye Movement)sleep, dreaming sleep. Rats
taught a maze and then deprived of REM sleep cannot run the maze well the next day; rats that
are taught thesamemaze but that get a good night’s of rat sleep with plenty of rat dreaming can
run the maze well the next day. People conked on the head who remain unconscious for hours and
are thereby deprived of normal sleep often have permanent amnesia of the previous day – it never
gets turned into long term memory.
Wikipedia: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep Apnea is also a great undiagnosed epidemic
(e.g. 24% of all males by late middle age, most of them untreated) andcan seriously affect learning.
Indeed, if you have any variation of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)and snore, or have any
symptoms of interrupted sleep due to breathing interruption or e.g. restless legs you
should probably read about the co-morbidity of sleep disorders andADD^5 and talk to your doctor
to make sure that you reallyhaveADD and are not suffering from a sleep disorder, as the two can
actually result in nearly identical daytime symptoms, including difficultylearning!
This is hardly surprising. Pure common sense and experience tell youthat your brain won’t
work too well if it is hungry and tired or oxygen deprived. Common sense (and yes, experience)
will rapidly convince you that learning generally works better if you’renot stoned or drunk when
you study. Learning worksmuchbetter when you havetimeto learn and haven’t put everything
off to the last minute. In fact, all of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs^6 are important parameters that
contribute to the probability of success in learning.
There is one more set of very important variables that strongly affect our ability to learn, and
they are in some ways the least well understood. These are variables that describe you as an
individual, that describe yourparticularbrain and how it works. Pretty much everybody will learn
better if they are self-actualized and fully and actively engaged, if the material they are trying to
learn is available in a form that makes sense and clearly communicates the implicit patterns that
enable efficient information compression and storage, and above allif theycareabout what they are
studying and learning, if it hasvalueto them.
But everybody is not the same, and theoptimallearning strategy for one person is not going to
be what works well, or even at all, for another. This is one of the things that confounds “simple”
empirical research that attempts to find benefit in one teaching/learning methodology over another.
Some studentsdoimprove, even dramatically improve – when this or that teaching/learning method-
ology is introduced. In others there is no change. Still others actually do worse. In the end, the
beneficial effect to a selected subgroup of the students may be lost in the statistical noise of the
study and the fact that no attempt is made to identify commonalitiesamong students that succeed
or fail.
The point is that finding an optimal teaching and learning strategy istechnicallyanoptimization
problem on a high dimensional space. We’ve discussedsomeof the important dimensions above,
isolating a few that appear to have a monotonic effect on the desiredoutcome in at least some range
(relying on common sense to cut off that range or suggest trade-offs – one cannot learn better by
simply discussing one idea for weeks at the expense of participating inlecture or discussing many
other ideas of equal and coordinated importance; sleeping for twenty hours a day leaves little time
(^5) A Clinical Overview of Sleep and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in Children and Adolescents
(^6) Wikipedia: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow’shierarchyofneeds. In a nutshell, in order to becomeself-
actualizedand realize your full potential in activities such as learning you need to have your physiological needs met,
you need to be safe, you need to be loved and secure in the world, you need to have good self-esteem and the esteem
of others. Only then is it particularly likely that you can become self-actualized and become a great learner and
problem solver.