Sleep Impact On Learning
Quality sleep includes the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) phase and the Non-Rapid Eye Movement phase; both are required if we want to be able to learn. Sleep directly affects cerebral changes responsible for learning and memory functioning. (Learning could be defined as a way of forming memory.) Also, studies have shown that a person can demonstrate knowledge only when they’ve had more than six hours of sleep. The brain needs time to arrange new information into the right places, and without this required time, information is not properly encoded into memory circuits.
So why do we need more than six hours, and not five or four? Our sleep cycle has different phases, and for learning and forming memories we need the first, as well as the last phase. The first two hours of sleep is deep sleep, or slow-wave sleep. In this phase memories from short time storage - hippocampus - are transferred to long time storage - into the cortex - and thus become long-term memories. After this phase, memories are transferred and our brain needs approximately two more hours to distribute these memories to different locations and networks. If we stop this process at this phase, our memories will not be preserved properly.
The last two hours of night sleep that we need are spent in the REM phase, the phase when we dream. This is the moment when the brain shuts off connections with the hippocampus and goes over and over stored memories, repeating them until they are learned properly.
It is more than obvious that we need six or more hours of sleep to learn things, and if you don’t have these six necessary hours, all the learning that you may have done during the day becomes useless.