It is not the first time we talked about the importance of children sleeping well, and we have even stated from our pages how necessary it is for children to acquire habits in this regard.
Today we have one more reason to insist on the subject, because Dr. Inés Wilhelm, from the University of Tübingen (in the German land of Württenberg), states that children unconsciously transform the material they learn during the day into active knowledge. And it has done so through a study with the participation of German and Swiss professionals, whose results have been published in Nature Neuroscience.
The researchers dedicated themselves to examining the ability to form explicit knowledge through an implicitly learned motor task.
For this they conducted an experiment with children between eight and 11 years old, comparing the results with a group of young adults. The test was to guess a predetermined series of actions, without anyone having explained to them what it was.
After a night of sleep or a full day awake, the memory of the participants who had been divided into groups was studied. After sleeping, everyone could remember more items in a row of numbers than those who stayed awake. The children had obtained better results.
And is that during sleep, memory is transformed to facilitate future learning, and implicit knowledge becomes explicit, facilitating the application in different areas.
The group of professionals led by Dr. Wilhelm claims the importance of children getting enough sleep for many reasons, but one of them is the large amount of information that must be assimilated daily (both for the learning processes, and for the fact that their brains are developing and receive many stimuli that for adults are not new but for them they are).
I think it is very important for adults to be aware of the relevance of a good sleep habit in childhood, and not only when they are young, but also when they enter adolescence, at which stage some boys and girls tend to go to bed too late.
