Pulling all-nighters over sleep, bad idea MSU professor says

Sometimes sleep can get the best of some students' studies!
Source: Educator.com

  

Studies show that getting adequate sleep helps the human brain function better and recall information easier, according to MSU psychology professor Kimberly Fenn.

Students face exams at least several times during a semester. Faced with busy schedules or maybe because of their own poor planning skills, students are forced to make an important decision the night before every exam: Should I study or sleep?

“Got a problem? Sleep on it. You’ll get it in the morning,” Fenn said, quoting the classic saying.

Students should get a minimum of six hours of sleep the night before an exam with seven hours of sleep being ideal, Fenn said. She also said that although this is the minimum recommendation, the way students function with different amounts of sleep changes from person to person.

“There is a lot of individual variability. Preceding nights all factor in to how a person will do on the exam,” Fenn said. She said that it is very important to get adequate sleep every night for at least a week before an exam, and not just good sleep the night before.

“It’s an absolutely terrible idea to stay up all night for a number of reasons,” Fenn said. When you are sleep deprived you are deprived of working memory.”

Working memory is a system for temporarily storing and managing the information required to carry out complex cognitive tasks such as learning, reasoning, and comprehension, according to medterms.com. It is involved in the selection, initiation, and termination of information-processing functions such as encoding, storing, and retrieving data.

Our frontal lobes, which are located behind the forehead, help regulate higher intellectual functions and form cognitive thoughts, as well as emotions and the forming of our social brain. The frontal lobe function, as well as the ability to perform motor tasks, is severely reduced by lack of sleep, Fenn said.

Getting too much sleep before an exam should not be a worry of students, Fenn said. She said our bodies can’t really sleep past the amount they need. We should wake up when our body is well recuperated.

On days of an exam it is also important to give yourself enough time to wake up and enough time for your body to adjust to being awake again. Every person’s body goes through a period when you wake up in the morning called sleep inertia, Fenn said. Sleep inertia, which by its formal name is when humans have confusional arousals, is the period of time right after you wake up, but your just not quite fully awake.

“You should wake up no less than 45 minutes before an exam,” Fenn said.

Although Fenn said that it is best to wake up early on the day of an exam, she also said that there is a way to overcome sleep inertia.

If you are one of those people who likes to wake up late or maybe just sleep past your alarm when it’s most important to get up, there’s still hope for you. Fenn said that if you wake up frightened or in a panic, you can actually bypass sleep inertia.

Lack of sleep can also lead to the formation of false memories, according to a study called “Sleep, Memory and Plasticity” by Annual Reviews Psychology in 2006. You may think you remember something on a test, but in fact you never learned what you thought you did. You can receive false confidence. In the study, it was found that sleep restores general information in one’s brain. Without sleep, false memories and wrong information is interpreted and accepted in the brain.

The study used word association to determine how information is stored by people who have adequate sleep. General information can decay quicker without proper sleep.

Fenn recognized this and said that sleep may be most important to those who study a foreign language. She said that foreign language word association is a great example of when people can answer more questions correctly after adequate sleep.

Here at MSU, many classes are in big lecture halls and therefore use multiple-choice exams to test students. In these tests, it is most important to get adequate sleep to prevent false memories, Fenn said.

Studies have been done at MSU using word association tests, where multiple words are paired together. Then, people are asked to recall what they remember after a period of time. It’s simple. People who get good sleep, remember more and don’t remember false answers, Fenn said.

“You are more likely to identify false foils,” Fenn said about trying to remember information when getting poor sleep beforehand.

One study technique has not interrupted sleep patterns and has worked well for MSU accounting sophomore Matthew Karvutske.

“I get about eight to ten hours of sleep. I purposely take off the night before the night before I have to take the test,” Karvutske said.

Another student wished she would have planned her time better and gotten better sleep before an exam earlier this year.

“I was up ‘til like, three thirty and my exam was at eight,” said nutritional sciences freshmen Olivia Sydow. “I didn’t do horrible, but I know I could have done better for sure.”

This chart shows that sleep prevents the generation of more false memories. The numbers are irrelevant. They show the scale to which false memories generate.

Source: October 2008 | Volume 3 | Issue 10 of “Sleep Loss Produces False Memories”; www.plosone.org

Nine's Plenty Enough For a Family

9... That's the number of Freshmen players the MSU Hockey team has on their roster for the 2009-2010 season. And one word can be used to describe them: family.
What's the difference from last year's squad you may ask?
 Freshmen right-winger Zach Golembiewski said that this year's group of players is a lot closer. He said that they all have come together as one for team get-togethers and they are closer off of the ice.
The MSU ice hockey team has started the season 9-3-2 overall and 6-2-2-0 in the Central Collegiate Hockey Association. Let me just say that's an improvement, to say the very least, from last years overall record of 10-23-5.
If you would have asked the players before the season if they thought they could be ranked, let alone 8th in the nation, especially in October, they probably would have said "no chance."
But, it's true. 
The Spartans were ranked 6th this season until they recently lost two games to the currently ranked 14th Fighting Irish of Notre Dame this past weekend.
The Spartan icers have a National Championship on their mind and are looking to the promise land once again, just as in 2007 when they finished as National Champions.
Highlights of the 2007 National Championship Game

Golembiewski was asked why the team is so close this year. He quoted his favorite movie "Miracle" and said, "We care a hell of a lot more about the name on the front of the jersey then we do about the one on the back." He went on to say that "everything they do, they represent the Spartan name."
Just like every other ice hockey player that has made it to the next level of play, the Spartan nine had to adjust to the new level of skill as well as the challenges that college life present. 
Freshmen left-winger, Dean Chelios said, that "everything was on a much smaller scale in high school."
According to the freshmen players, before going to play college hockey, nearly all players go on to play juniors somewhere. They said the three main leagues are the United States Hockey League, the North American Hockey League and the British Columbia Hockey League.
All of the freshmen on the MSU squad agreed that there is a considerable jump of ability and skill, as levels get higher: from high school, to juniors, to college. They all agreed that college life is a lot busier too.

2012... The End of the World as we Know it? Or a New Beginning???

Countdown To The End of the Mayan Calendar

1,149 days!!! What’s that, you may ask??? That’s the number of days until December 21st 2012. The day that some believe marks the end of the world! Sounds crazy, huh? The Mayan calendar, which is known to be the most accurate calendar to date, does not continue past the winter solstice of 2012. I’m sure many of us have heard about the Mayan calendar before, but do we truly understand how it works and why it is believed to be the most dependable and accurate?

The ancient Native American civilization, known as the Maya, lived in the region that today is Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and western Honduras. The Mayans were extremely innovative and their knowledge at the time was like none other. The Maya built colossal stone pyramids, temples, sculptures, and developed their own language of writing using hieroglyphs. The Maya had very precise knowledge and understanding of our solar system and it’s cycles. Just considering how long ago the Mayan civilization was first established and when it thrived, is amazing. The Mayan civilization was initially established between 2000 B.C. and 300 A.D. But the Mayans did not reach their highest state of development until between 300 A.D. and 900 A.D., according to archaeologists.

The Maya believed that our solar system completes cycles that ultimately make up one entire cycle, called a galactic day. One galactic day, they believed, takes 25,625 years to complete. According to the Maya, we are approaching the end of the fifth and final individual cycle, with each cycle lasting 5,125 years.

On December of 2012 the Mayans believe that humanity will enter what they call the Golden Age: a time where we can transform our civilization based on fear to a civilization centered on harmony. On that date, they said the Sun, which will have received a powerful light from the center of the Galaxy, would ultimately change its polarity and drive human kind to be ready to move into the Golden Age era.

One of theMayans first prophesies talks about a period at the end of each cycle called 'The Time of No-Time'. This is the last 20 years of each cycle; meaning from 1992-2012. The Mayans said that during this time “solar winds” would become intense, and also that the last 20 years up until 2012 would be a great realization for mankind. That because of our own contamination and lack of preservation of the Earth, we would lead to these changes of mankind and the world. According to the Mayans, these changes would occur so that mankind could advance to superior levels and leave behind materialism and would free everyone from suffering.

The Mayan calendar does not necessarily say that the world will abruptly end in December of 2012, but rather that it is up to us to determine our future. Hopefully, if we can change our habits of pollution and fear, according to the Maya, live a life of peace and tranquility.

The movie “2012” which is a dramatization based on the Mayan calendar prediction is set to be released on November 13th of this year.