Sleeping Children Learn Better Than Adults
Knowledge Machine Alessandro Zangrilli via Wikimedia CommonsNap time, anyone? While you're asleep, your brain is busy updating and rebooting. It takes the information you've gathered throughout the day subconsciously and processes it into explicit, conscious knowledge. Children usually perform worse than adults at cognitive tasks, but a new study shows that they are significantly better at this process of implicit to explicit conversion than adults. As a child, you sleep more deeply than an adult, and experience three times more slow-wave sleep and higher electrical activity in the brain during that sleep. This may help turn the large amount of information you accumulate during the day into knowledge you can recall intentionally. The study, published in Nature Neuroscience this week, looked at 35 children between 8 and 11 years old, as well as 37 adults between 18 and 35. They were each asked to quickly press a sequence...