Sleeping in young and aged people

In young people, sleeping is viewed as very helpful and young people also believe that it helps them remember things unlike in older people, sleeping does not help them remember. Sleep has been shown in a wide variety of studies to increase people’s ability to recall words and objects and to improve physical skills. But that may only be available in the young ones. Researchers have shown that a night of sleep improves young people’s ability to learn a series of button presses similar to playing a piano. In adults over 50 years of age, that was not the case; they did not get a bump in performance from sleeping. But scientists believe that that difference may have been due to older folks’ slower reaction times. Although that does not agree with the new study, though, they suggest that its sleep’s memory benefits that are reduced with age.

The reason older people have trouble learning new tricks may be due to fragmented sleep patterns. Older people sometimes wake up more in the night (often to go to the bathroom), but also as people age, their sleep cycles get shorter. Although older and younger people get the same amount of sleep, older people spend less time per cycle in each of sleep’s stages. Particularly important in this case may be that older people spend less time in sleep stage 2, in which the day’s events are played back and committed to memory. It could also be that older people just don’t have enough time to replay and remember the entire sequence of the days’ events.

Most teens have trouble waking up in the morning or for school because their bodies drift in a later direction. In order for everyone to avoid sleep disorders in the future, everyone is advised to pay close attention to their sleep health.

Your brain knows you more than you think

 The unconscious workings of the brain are so critical to everyday functioning that their influence often trumps conscious thought. There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing. Consider the simple act of changing lanes while driving a car. The motion of turning the wheel rightward for a bit, then straightening it out again would steer you off the road: you just piloted a course from the left lane onto the sidewalk. The correct motion for changing lanes is banking the wheel to the right, then back through the center, and continuing to turn the wheel just as far to the left side, and only then straightening out. You are not consciously aware of the vast majority of your brain’s ongoing activities.  The best choice is that you not want to be because it would interfere with the brain’s well-oiled processes. The ability to remember motor acts like changing lanes is called procedural memory. It is a type of implicit memory meaning that your brain holds knowledge of something that your mind cannot explicitly access.

By the early 1600s, René Descartes had already begun to suspect that although experience with the world is stored in memory, not all memory is accessible. The concept was rekindled in the late 1800s by the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who wrote that “most of these experiences remain concealed from consciousness and yet produce an effect which is significant and which authenticates their previous existence.” To the extent that consciousness is useful, it is useful in small quantities, and for very particular kinds of tasks.

I agree with the fact that my brain knows me more than I know myself  because sometimes I do things, but I cannot explain how I did them  or demonstrate the process step by step. I suspect my brains well, but too dab it cannot talk.