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The Sleepy Brain (June 11, 2004, One)

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Program Summary

You’re getting sleepy. Your eyes close and your brain closes up shop for another night—to catch up and rest, right? Maybe not. There may be a lot more going on in your brain while you’re sleeping than you ever dreamed.

From elephants to frogs to flies, every animal needs sleep to survive. But why? New research shows that sleep seems to play an important role in learning. You can actually get better at certain tasks--not necessarily by simply practicing--but by getting a good night's sleep after you learn them. That’s something to sleep on since we, on average, spend about one-third of our lives being asleep.

Guests

Guilio Tononi, professor of Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, Wisconsin

Related Links and Resources

National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke’s Brain Basics Understanding Sleep
National Sleep Foundation
Society for Neuroscience’s Sleep and Learning

For Discussion:

• Why do we sleep?
• What happens if we don’t sleep?
• How does a bad night's sleep affect you?
• How is sleep important to learning?

Activities

Wake up!. Pfizer’s Brain—The World Inside Your Head is brimming with lesson plans on the brain, from general information to the senses, reflexes and memory; Spying on Sleep where students keep a sleep journal and analyze the outcome; and Deciphering Dreams where they keep a dream journal and correlate their findings with events in their lives.

Zzzzzzzz. What Is Sleep and Why Do We Do It? from Neuroscience for Kids is a good general overview of sleep, covering such topics as the stages of sleep, REM and the restorative process of sleep. Sleep and Dreaming Experiments are activities that students can do on their own to discover their own sleep patterns as well as observing sleep patterns in others.

Up all night. In Getting Up on the Wrong Side of the Bed Every Day? from the NY Times Learning Archives, students explore the very real problem of sleep deprivation in teenagers and how it affects their behavior during the day. They analyze their own sleep patterns, evaluate the impact of being better rested and brainstorm ways to create more time in their schedules to sleep.

Use the search box below to perform a Google search within any of the specifc sites or general domains mentioned in this Activities section.

Hear the Program

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