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— Asya, does your knowledge of neurobiology come in handy in everyday life?
“It’s useful to be a biologist, because you understand how many stupid things we do by nature. The brain is prone to exhaustion, overwork, because in modern conditions it is forced to process more information than it can. Our task is to provide him with the most favorable conditions for work. For example, sleep is very important. During sleep, the brain processes the information it has acquired during the day and decides what to remember and what to forget.
It is well known that a person who has learned something and went to bed will later reproduce the information better than the one who has learned it, then do other things all day and only after that go to bed. The world has a very inefficient workflow. So when we neuroscientists come into power, everyone will be studying and working the second shift (evil laughter off-screen).
Do you think it’s better for children to go to school in the afternoon?
“Second shift is a really good thing because people are getting enough sleep! Although if you still send your child for swimming, English, etc., before school, it can only be worse: the child will come to class already tired.
Teenagers are the hardest
– The problem of lack of sleep is most relevant for adolescents. They are stronger than children and adults, prone to an owl lifestyle: on average, they begin to produce melatonin, the sleep hormone, later, and most teenagers cannot fall asleep at 9 pm, even if they really want to. An experiment was conducted: 8th graders and 10th graders who got up at the same time for a week were seated in a laboratory with subdued lights and their melatonin levels were checked every 15 minutes. The older the student turned out to be, the later he reached that peak of melatonin at which he could fall asleep.
In children, academic performance increases by 3% if classes are shifted from early morning by an hour or two. It rises because they get more sleep. This is best seen in teenagers.
But that 3% is an average. The results of those who studied the worst of all improve most noticeably. Maybe they did not study well precisely because they chronically did not get enough sleep.
– And how much sleep do you need?
– In general, the principle works: the younger the person, the more sleep he needs. Adults usually need 7,5 hours of sleep, and a high school student should sleep 9 hours. Almost none of them do this. And, perhaps, many psychological problems would manifest themselves much milder in adolescents if they had the opportunity to get enough sleep regularly.
But what time to go to bed and get up – it does not matter if you do it every day at the same time.
Jogging and dancing improve memory
– Sleep is clear. What else is important for brain training?
– Traffic. For a normal blood supply to the brain, it is not necessary to move a lot. Enough 150 minutes a week, if it is not very intense movement: brisk walking, swimming, dancing. Or at least 70 minutes if we are talking about intense sports. Let’s say running.
Children and teenagers get their 150 minutes of walking one way or another, because they have physical education lessons, they are more active, they have a lot of energy and little money. But after 40 years, when a person has a car or money to call a taxi, order pizza at home, there is always the opportunity to sit in front of the TV instead of going somewhere, he begins to suffer from inactivity.
When a person leads a sedentary lifestyle, he not only gets fat. Problems with the brain begin much earlier: the heart does not receive the necessary load and does not actively pump blood through the vessels. The brain suffers from lack of glucose, oxygen and nutrients. This is bad for attention and memory.
– Then the smartest people should be professional athletes. But often the opposite is true…
“I don’t mean sports feats! They just can distract from intellectual activity. We are talking about a normal moderate regular load. People who run treadmills for 20 minutes every day consistently show higher results in tests of intelligence, memory, and attention.
Training is more important than food for the mind
What else is good for the brain?
“Sleep, move, and… study.” When we learn something, the brain changes at the anatomical level. The more you engage in intellectual activity, the easier it is for you to do it.
“Maybe something to eat to improve memory?”
– The question of food for the brain is not so fundamental. He is already the main one in the body, so one way or another he will collect for himself the most useful of what you have eaten. The issues of healthy eating also affect the brain, of course, but not directly, but in the long term – at the expense of general health. If you eat junk food, it is bad for the work of blood vessels. And then, due to the poor functioning of the heart and blood vessels, the brain begins to receive less blood and cannot fully work.
How to maintain clarity of mind in old age?
– It has been proven that in older people who were engaged in intellectual activity, the decline in functions associated with the work of the brain is much slower. Including memory impairment. Now in Tasmania (a state in Australia. – Ed.) They launched a project – they force older people to go to university, study, take tests, do homework. We found out that these retired students improve their knowledge – but they are connected only with the discipline in which they study. And if you look at general intellectual functions – the amount of working memory, the ability to solve puzzles, the speed of decision-making – it turns out that this training in old age is not particularly affected. But on the other hand, training at a younger age has a good effect on this.
Laws that help remember information
- It’s important to repeat. When learning, the brain changes anatomically, the connections between neurons become stronger. The more times you scroll through the information, the more reliably it will be recorded in long-term memory.
- Study before bed.
- Law of Interest. When you are interested, you remember it better.
- Зinstallation acon. When you firmly decide that you must learn something, you are more likely to learn it, because you will surely repeat it, scroll through it in your head.
- Context. We remember much better what we put into context, that is, we correlate with what is already in memory. If you know that Orwell has 1984, it will be easier for you to remember the numbers 1, 9, 8, 4.
- Law of row length. The amount of working memory is small, so if you need to learn eight pieces of information, it is better to divide them into two lists of four than to try to remember the whole thing. So, it’s easier to learn not separate numbers 1, 9, 4, 5, 2, 0, 1, 9, but divide them into 1945 and 2019).
- Law of inhibition. If we remember similar elements of information at the same time, we can get confused in them and not remember either one or the other. If you learn English and French at the same time, there is a chance that the words will mix up in your head.
- Act the end. It is better to remember what was at the beginning or at the end.
- Law actions. When we try to put something into practice, we remember it better because we focus on it.
In the vast majority of cases, when we talk about memory problems, we mean problems with focusing attention.
Who is more successful: larks or owls
— Among successful people, there are many early risers who have peak performance in the first half of the day. And you say they’re kind of losing…
– Larks are usually more successful and healthier than owls for two reasons. Firstly, it is useful for any person to sleep in the dark most of the night and wake up in the light. The lark does this naturally, but the owl often lies down at dawn in the summer or wakes up in the evening twilight in the winter. The second reason is even more banal: in our society, the lark is much more likely to get enough sleep. If you have to go to work by nine in the morning, the lark will wake up by this moment, and the owl will painfully pick itself out of bed … Owls have to choose professions where they don’t have to work by nine in the morning, or become such valuable employees as to have a free schedule . If this succeeds, the owl will achieve great success.