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Monthly Archives: May 2018

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The Neuroscience of Intelligence: “Slim” Neural Networks
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May-29-2018

The Neuroscience of Intelligence: “Slim” Neural Networks

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We’re a “more is better” culture, and so we’re quick to assume that more brain stuff is better.

slim neural networks

Presumably, we want to have more neurons. We want to have more synapses. We want to have higher brain volumes in essential brain regions.

However, recent research suggests an alternate theory.

Slim Neural Networks

According to a recent study by Erhan Genç, published in Nature Communications,

the neuronal circuitry associated with higher intelligence is organized in a sparse and efficient manner, fostering more directed information processing and less cortical activity during reasoning.

Or, as Genç writes:

Intelligent brains are characterized by a slim but efficient network of their neurons. This makes it possible to achieve a high level of thinking with the least possible neural activity.

So: despite our cultural preferences, more isn’t necessarily better. Sometimes, a “slimmer” neural network works better than a more complex one.

Slim Neural Networks: “Blooming and Pruning”

When neuroscientists talk about the neural network development, they often talk with gardening terminology: “blooming” and “pruning.”

Networks “bloom” when neurons join together to create a memory or facilitate a particular function.

The “prune” when the brain simplifies those networks.

Sometimes pruning happens because of disuse. If you learned to juggle when you were younger, you have to keep practicing. If not, that network will start to thin.

Sometimes pruning happens because of expertise. If you keep practicing your juggling, you’ll use fewer neurons than when you started.

As teachers, therefore, we’re working to help brains simultaneously bloom and prune.

We want our students to develop new skills and acquire new information.

And, as they develop their expertise, we want those networks to prune.

The best teaching/gardening, in other words, requires both seeds and clippers.

 

For more thoughts on the relative size of brain regions, click here.

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Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May-26-2018

No Grades? Doug Lemov Just Isn’t Having It…

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If you’ve read Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion, you know he focuses not on the theoretical but on the practical.

no grades

When Lemov sees teachers doing something that works (he’s got a rigorous definition of “works”), then he thinks you should do that. When they do something that doesn’t work (ditto), he thinks you should stop.

No Grades, No Meritocracy?

Although lots of people champion doing away with grades, Lemov strongly dissents. In his view, the end of grades would inevitably result in the end of meritocracy.

As you can imagine, his post has prompted a heated debate — much of it articulate and thoughtful. Check it out at the link above.

Should Mothers Help Children With Homework?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May-24-2018

Should Mothers Help Children With Homework?

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Does a mother’s homework help benefit her children? Do they study better? Do they learn more?

mother's homework help

Over the years, researchers have found conflicting answers to these questions.

Perhaps that conflict results from the different kinds of “help” that mothers might provide. Researchers in Finland wanted to find out.

Asking the Right Questions

Jaana Viljaranta and her colleagues worked with several hundred 2nd-4th graders, their mothers, and their teachers.

(The researchers don’t explain why they focus on mothers. I imagine they assume that mothers offer more help than fathers, and – to be precise – focus on “maternal behavior” rather than “parental behavior.”)

Rather than simply ask “do you help your children with their homework,” they had mothers rate themselves in three categories.

Perhaps these mothers provide actual help or guidance.

Perhaps they simply check to see if their child has done the homework.

Or, perhaps they “grant autonomy”; that is, “trust that the child takes care of home assignments by him/herself.”

They looked for a connection between these self-ratings and two results.

First, what effect did this maternal behavior have on task-persistence? They had teachers answer questions like “does the student actively attempt to solve even difficult situations and tasks?”

And second: what effect did it have on students’ learning? Here, researchers used a standard measurement of reading and math skill – not the students’ grades.

A Mother’s Homework Help: Finding the Answers

Because researchers measured so many variables, they’ve got a lot of potential relationships to map.

The short version is:

When mothers help with homework, children are less task-persistent on their own.

When mothers grant autonomy, children are more task-persistent.

And, when mothers check that homework got done, that doesn’t influence task-persistence either way.

(These three findings apply to 2nd and 3rd grade, not 4th.)

In turn, increased task persistence suggested higher grades, and decreased task persistence suggested lower grades. (For both those findings, the results didn’t quite achieve statistical significance.)

In sum: help doesn’t help. Granting autonomy does.

A Mother’s Homework Help: Explaining the Answers

Why is this so? Why doesn’t homework help help?

The Finnish researchers based their study on a well-known theory about motivation: Self-Determination Theory. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan argue that people are motivated by a desire for three things: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Viljaranta and colleagues reason thus: when mothers help their children with homework, they reduce their child’s autonomy, and imply that they think their children lack necessary competence.

By holding back from helping, on the other hand, mothers boost their children’s sense of autonomy. They also show that they believe their children can get the work done on their own.

By promoting autonomy and competence, these mothers help their children develop intrinsic motivation, and thereby improve task persistence.

Not Too Fast…

All research has limitations, and we should keep this study’s limitations in mind.

This is only one study.

It was done in a very particular cultural context. (Grade school in Finland.)

And: researchers found a task-persistence effect only in 2nd and 3rd grade, not 4th. (And, they didn’t find statistically significant difference in learning at any point.)

Finally: researchers report on averages. Your child isn’t average.

Even if many (or most) children benefit when they get autonomy, others just might need some more support.

Research can help inform our decisions, but we must make those decisions one child at a time.

Addendum

After I wrote the post above, I discussed this research with a colleague who teachers in Finland. He responds thus:

The conclusion of the study may contain a cultural bias [as all research does — editor’s note.] Generally speaking, parents in Finland are quite hands off with schools — the very opposite of helicopter parenting. There is also a cultural preference for developing independence from a young age.

In other words: “granting autonomy” is already a cultural norm in Finland in ways that it might not be elsewhere. This background might influence our understanding of this research.

You, Your Child, and School: Navigating Your Way to the Best Education by Sir Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica
Rebecca Gotlieb
Rebecca Gotlieb
May-22-2018

You, Your Child, and School: Navigating Your Way to the Best Education by Sir Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica

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Sir Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica previously argued in their 2015 book Creative Schools (reviewed here) that we should pursue individualized and holistic learning.  The duo have now written a sequel of sorts, for parents of school age children. In You, Your Child, and School: Navigating Your Way to the Best Education Robinson and Aronica: 1) review the ways society is changing and the implications for education; 2) note several challenges related to ensuring students receive a quality education; and 3) help parents analyze how to overcome these challenges so that their children get the education they need to live fulfilled lives.

Great parents create the conditions that support their children’s growth.  They work to ensure that the needs in Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs– physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem, self-actualization—are fulfilled for their children.  They recognize that there are, as Howard Gardner has argued, multiple types of intelligence, and they help their children identify their talents. Great parents recognize that different aspects of development (e.g., cognitive, emotional, physical) co-occur and impact one another.  They encourage a lot of play, especially outside.  Finally, great parents encourage healthy sleep and exercise habits to help mitigate the substantial stress that students experience. Great teachers help students stay excited about learning, build students’ confidence, demonstrate passion, focus on relationships, and are experts in knowing how people learn.

Quality education supports students in becoming fulfilled and engaged adults by supporting the development of the eight competencies Robinson and Aronica detailed in Creative Schools: curiosity, creativity, criticism, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure, and citizenship. These competencies help students develop socially, emotionally, and culturally. Quality education is practical, showing connections between theory and practice to help engage students.

Quality education also prepares students for the future. Today’s typical education may not be the best way to prepare kids for the future because it is difficult to know what jobs today’s students will hold. Robinson and Aronica argue that a college degree, which has become increasingly expensive, is no longer a guarantee of a good job. The emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and math fields not only leads to some students being less engaged in school, but it may also be ignoring ways in which the arts and humanities help students develop important workforce skills. They argue that we are doing a disservice both to students and to society by not offering more vocational education courses in high school and not endowing vocational tracks with more respect. One out of every three jobs requires non-college professional training, and yet only 12% of people have that training. These jobs can be fulfilling and even pay commensurate with jobs that require a college degree. Parents, children, and schools should work together to find the best educational and career path for each child.

Robinson and Aronica suggest several factors for parents to consider when determining whether a school will fit their child’s needs. They suggest parents look for schools with a broad, balanced, and dynamic curriculum that teaches not only the academic disciplines but also physical education, arts, and social and life skills. Parents should consider whether teachers flexibly modify their practice to students’ needs. Parents should seek schools that use assessments that are open, informative, and ongoing. School schedules ideally are flexible and varied. The environment should be safe and stimulating.  Schools should capitalize on and contribute to the wider community.

When the local public school does not have these elements, Robinson and Aronica argue that parents can change the schools from within them or from outside of them. They can also take their children out of the school system. They draw on the work of Jerry Mintz to list indicators for homeschooling or “unschooling” a child. They suggest that parents can try to connect more with their child’s teachers, get involved with the school (e.g., volunteering in the library), participate in school governance (e.g., parent teacher associations), or advocate for changes to education policy. They offer advice about how parents should behave when raising a complaint and what parents should expect from their child’s school in addressing their concern. Robinson and Aronica offer advice also about common problems that kids face in school, e.g., homework, stress, bullying, and attentional issues.

Consistent with a message these authors have shared previously, the main theme in You, Your Child, and School,is one that is not new to parents and yet is reassuring to have affirmed: every child is unique, one type of education is not appropriate for all students, and life is not linear. Parents and educators alike can better serve children when bearing this in mind.

 

Robinson, K., & Aronica, L. (2018). You, Your Child, and School: Navigating Your Way to the Best Education. New York, NY: Viking Penguin.

Crucial in the Classroom: Distinguishing between Experts & Novices
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May-21-2018

Crucial in the Classroom: Distinguishing between Experts & Novices

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Over at A Chemical Orthodoxy, Adam Boxer explores the crucial distinction between novices & experts.

novices & experts

In particular, he offers some helpful diagrams to depict key differences. Not only do novices and experts know different facts and feel at ease with different procedures. They think very differently about the facts and procedures they know.

A few of Adam’s essential conclusions:

Experts notice features and meaningful patterns of information that are not noticed by novices…

Experts are able to flexibly retrieve important aspects of their knowledge with little attentional effort…

Though experts know their disciplines thoroughly, this does not guarantee that they are able to teach others…

Novices & Experts: The Teaching Implications

First: We can’t teach novices by treating them like experts. They won’t learn what we want them to learn, because they don’t yet think like experts.

In fact, as this famous chess study demonstrates, they don’t even notice the same things that experts see. Even before they think about the world, experts literally perceive the world differently. (I’m an English teacher, so when I say literally, I mean literally.)

Second: This insight gives teachers a clear goal.

To lead our students to ultimate expertise, we want them to know the facts, procedures, and patterns essential to a particular discipline.

Adam’s article gives two helpful examples of exactly this work. How do we help novices become experts in English? In Geography? And—by extension—the topics you teach? Check out the link above.

Novices & Experts: Project Pedagogies

Third: Some pedagogical strategies that sound good just might not work.

“Authentic assessment,” for example, has a nice ring to it, and plenty of authentic assessments can motivate students to learn deeply.

At the same time, some authentic assessments might ask novices to behave like experts. If my senior elective in business economics asks my students to start a business…there’s a real danger here. This expectation might require more expertise of my novice learners than they can plausibly demonstrate.

To return to the list above:

They might not yet notice patterns of employee or consumer behavior that experts would spot in a second…

They might need LOTS of attentional effort—far more than they plausibly have to spare—to pull up essential information from different places. Clearly, they have to consider payroll, marketing strategies, the lease they’re negotiating, and the applicable state laws…

My own expertise in running a business doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ve explained any of those points clearly enough in the first place.

If you run across a teaching philosophy that asks novices to think like experts, you should at least ask hard questions.

Better yet: revise its expectations so that the novices we teach can make the gradual progress that least ultimately to expertise.

If you’d like to read further on this topic, Chapter 6 of Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School?  will guide you well. It’s grounding principle: “Experts think differently from novices.”

Let’s Get Practical: More Flashcards Are Better
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May-19-2018

Let’s Get Practical: More Flashcards Are Better

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Teachers certainly can benefit from background brain knowledge. It’s fascinating, for instance, to learn about the intricacies of neural network formation.

flashcard strategies

At the same time, we and our students often want practical classroom guidance. What exactly should we DO — and, in particular, what should we DO DIFFERENTLY?

For example: given the enthusiasm with which our students turn to flashcards, we should welcome any guidance on their best use.

Here’s a helpfully specific question: should our students use relatively small or relatively large stacks of cards?

Theory Meets Practice: Flashcard Strategies

Psychologists have a theory that should answer that question.

The “spacing effect” says that the same amount of practice spread out over time (“spaced“), rather than done all at once (“massed“), yields more learning.

If a student has — for example — only 5 flashcards in a pile, then she’ll encounter those words more frequently. On the other hand, if she has 20 flashcards in that  pile, then more time passes between each repetition.

5 flashcards = massing; 20 flashcards = spacing. Therefore, 20 flashcards ought to be better.

Nate Kornell, a practical researcher who writes with welcome clarity, tried just this experiment.

Students learned some word pairs with 4 piles of 5 flashcards each. They learned other word pairs with 1 pile of 20 flashcards.

Which flashcard strategy led to better recall the following day?

As the theory predicted, the larger pile of flashcards lead to better memory. In one trial, massed practice resulted in score of 38%. Spaced practice led to a score of 65%.

Crucially: students had the same amount of time to study the same number of words. Simply organizing those words one way (the big pile) rather than the other way (little pile) resulted in more learning.

A Paradox, and a Resolution

In Kornell’s study, larger stacks of flashcards yielded more learning for 90% of the students. And yet, even after they themselves had tried both approaches, 72% preferred the (ineffective) small stacks.

What gives? Why do they prefer ineffective flashcard strategies?

Kornell suspect that students prefer the study approach where they feel they’re making faster progress. Sadly, as happens quite often, the strategy that feels good in fact creates less learning.

Another example of this phenomenon: students typically prefer to reread passages rather than quiz themselves. Rereading doesn’t help them learn much, but it does make them feel more confident. (“I recognize that part! I must have learned it…”)

Flashcard Strategies: The Perfect Number

Given Kornell’s research, it’s tempting to think that students should always sort their flashcards into stacks of 20.

Instead of focusing on number, we should instead focus on relative challenge. The flashcard pile should be big enough so that

a) students feel stretched by the information they’re practicing, but

b) they don’t feel discouraged or overwhelmed.

That number will probably be higher than they would naturally choose. But it won’t be huge.

We might prefer to have more precise guidance than this. However, no one rule will apply equally well to all students.

The correct number of cards in a pile will be different in 2nd grade, 8th grade, and college. It will be different in subjects when students struggle and in subjects where they thrive. It will be different for flashcards that contain a lot of information and those with just a word or two.

Combining our teacherly experience with Kornell’s researcherly insight will lead to the best result we can hope for: flashcard strategies that promote optimum learning conditions.

Concerned about Concussions: Athletes and Actors
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May-16-2018

Concerned about Concussions: Athletes and Actors

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If you’re interested in brains, then you’re almost certainly worried about concussions.

Stories about professional athletes have made these concerns especially vivid.  When we see yet another story about a Wheaties-box sports star changed beyond recognition by multiple concussions, we worry about sportsy students in our own schools. And families.

(By the way: data about sports concussions reveal many surprises. Girls playing soccer are in greater danger of concussion than boys playing football. The sports that have seen the greatest increase in concussions in the last decade? Boys’ baseball and girls’ volleyball. Yes: volleyball.)

Today’s News: Actors and Concussions

Recent research suggests that the dangers of concussions go well beyond the hockey rink.

A survey of theater professionals shows that 67% of them had at least one concussion during their careers. Almost a third of them report 5 concussions.

That’s a very troubling number. Each concussion can cause more damage than the previous one, and even two concussions raise the possibility for long-term damage.

Just as troubling: what happened next. Most of the theater pros kept going; almost half didn’t even report what happened.

Clearly, in theater as in sports, professional culture tells adults to play through the pain. If that culture seeps down into schools, it could produce real problems.

Of course, this survey looks at theater pros, not amateurs. I haven’t been able to find data about dangers to younger actors.

At a minimum, this research should prompt us to recognize concussions in places we might not have looked for them.

Arachne’s Example

In 2010, Natalie Mendoza played a leading role in the Broadway production of Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark. While starring as the villain Arachne, she was struck in the head by a rope backstage and suffered a concussion.

What did she do next?

She finished the Sunday performance. And she played Wednesday evening as well.

And then: she left the show.

Rather than risk her brain health further (in a remarkably athletic role), she left a choice Broadway role.

Our theater students should know Mendoza’s example. A starring role on Broadway can be the pinnacle of a career. But that career won’t mean much if it fundamentally disrupts the brain.

When You Want Higher Brain Entropy, Add Caffeine
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May-14-2018

When You Want Higher Brain Entropy, Add Caffeine

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In the past, caffeine and cognitionI’ve posted about the learning benefits of wine and of chocolate. Today — to complete the trifecta — I’ve found research into the benefits of caffeine.

(You can thank me with a cup of java later.)

 

Caffeine and Cognition: The Simple Study

This study could not have been simpler. Researchers had students lie quietly in an fMRI scanner in a caffeine-free state on one day. After 48 hours, the same students took a caffeine pill and repeated the scan.

(Just to be sure that order didn’t matter, half of the students took the pill first for the first scan. The other half took the pill for the second scan.)

What did they find?

Caffeine and Cognition: The Complicated Results

After they took the caffeine pill, the students had more good brain stuff.

In this case, the good brain stuff was “brain entropy.”

What’s that? According to this study, the

concept of brain entropy has been defined as the number of neural states a given brain can access.

The same study also finds that higher levels of intelligence — measured by the Shipley Vocabulary test and WASI Matrix Reasoning test — are associated with higher levels of brain entropy.

(Important note: “associated with” doesn’t mean “cause.” It means that people who have higher levels of one often have higher levels of the other. But, we shouldn’t — in fact, can’t — infer causality.)

If we’re feeling daring, we might pose this hypothesis: taking caffeine raises brain entropy, and brain entropy helps you think better.

That’s an especially tempting hypothesis because caffeine increases brain entropy in the pre-frontal cortex. You hear a lot about the PFC and Learning and the Brain conferences, because so many important cognitive and self-regulatory functions use those networks.

What Should Teachers Do?

At present, this study points in the direction of that tempting hypothesis. But, it doesn’t directly support it.

We need lots more testing to confirm this idea.

In fact, the whole concept of “brain entropy” is still in its early stages, and we need to investigate the fully idea before we reach strong conclusions based upon it.

So: ponder brain entropy while you’re drinking your next cup of joe. You’ve got lots to consider.

3rd Graders Beware! The Perils of Mindfulness Research
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May-11-2018

3rd Graders Beware! The Perils of Mindfulness Research

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In our frantic, stressed-out, technology-addled world, it just makes sense: we should all take some time to rest our brains.

And: what better way than mindfulness?

perils of mindfulness research

We’ve all heard so much about the benefits of focused breathing. The energy that derives from specific poses. The insights that come from curious attention to our bodies.

So: what’s not to love about mindfulness?

Yoga and Mindfulness in 3rd Grade

In 2016 and 2017, researchers worked with high-anxiety 3rd graders at a school in New Orleans.

20 of these students went through a combined yoga and mindfulness program. This program has good research behind it, and was led by an experienced professional. As the researchers describe it,

The session content included breathing exercises, guided relaxation, and several Vinyasa and Ashtanga poses appropriate for third graders.

And, the school devoted real time to this program. Students met before school 10 times, for forty minutes each session. 400 minutes shows real commitment!

Researchers also kept track of 33 other high-anxiety 3rd graders who had been randomly selected as the control group.

Both before and after the yoga/mindfulness program, the students answered a list of questions that measure physical, emotional, and social quality of life. (It’s euphoniously called the PedsQL.)

So: did those 400 minutes help?

The Benefits of Mindfulness

In part, it seems the program helped.

For example, the 3rd graders who participated in yoga and mindfulness saw an increase in their emotional PedsQL score of more than 18 points. Given that the scale ranges from 1 to 100, and that they started with an average score of 52, AND that the control group’s average fell by just under a point — that’s a dramatic improvement!

Researchers also found a statistically significant improvement in their psychosocial PedsQL score.

In a parallel track of this investigation, researchers offered a professional development session on mindfulness for the school’s teachers.

As a result, they found that more teachers used mindfulness and yoga with their students during the class day. Depending on how you count, teachers roughly doubled the number of sessions they used in their classrooms.

So far, so good.

The Perils of Mindfulness Research

Despite all these measurements, I remain unpersuaded by this study.

Three concerns jump out at me.

First: the study includes a control group…but the control group didn’t do anything different from their normal routine. (They were treated for anxiety in the school’s usual way.)

So: the benefits described above might have resulted from the yoga and mindfulness. But, it might just have well resulted from doing something different. Maybe these students would have scored higher on the PedsQL if they’d gone hiking. Or, made music. Or simply arrived at school 40 minutes early and done something relaxing.

We just don’t know.

Second: the students did score higher on the emotional and psychosocial PedsQL, but those are only 2 of the 6 measures on the test. Their scores on the other scales — school, social, physical, and overall — weren’t statistically significantly improved.

In fact, if you look at table 2 instead of table 3, it seems that only the emotional and not the psychosocial scores improved. (Table 3 shows the results of more sophisticated statistical modelling.)

Even in the best case, then, the yoga and meditation helped students on some measures. On 2/3 of the measures, however, it didn’t make a measurable difference.

Third: in this study, classroom teachers started doing additional yoga with their students as well.

So, perhaps the change we saw resulted from the special yoga and mindfulness intervention. Or, perhaps it resulted from the additional classroom yoga. Or, perhaps from the combination.

Again: we just don’t know.

The Perils of Mindfulness Research: The Big Picture

My point here is not to criticize this study. I am, in fact, quite glad that researchers are working with students in schools.

In fact, these researchers — quite helpfully — asked teachers about the biggest impediments for having a mindfulness program in the school.

Instead, I want to highlight how difficult it is to be confident about cause and effect.

In truth, I really want to be persuaded. I want to be able to tell teachers that we’ve got a sure-fire solution to real school problems.

But, my desire to be persuaded means I must be especially vigilant about the research I rely on.

In fact, as noted before on this blog, research in this field isn’t improving as fast as we’d like it to.

Ultimately, if we’re going to tell students to come to school early, if we’re going to ask them to spend 400 minutes doing something, if we’re going to create new programs and hire more staff, we need to be sure that this cause produces this effect.

As of today, I don’t think we’re sure enough.

Solving the Nap Research Problem (BTW: Naps Help!)
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May-09-2018

Solving the Nap Research Problem (BTW: Naps Help!)

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Do naps improve learning?nap research

If you teach teenagers, you almost certainly want to know the answer to that question. Whenever I talk with adolescents about brains, it’s one of the first questions I get.

Alas: an important muddle makes that question noticeably hard to answer.

The Nap Research Problem Explained

On the one hand, we’ve got plenty of research showing that naps boost learning.

If I give you a list of words to study, you’ll remember more of them after a nap than you would if you hadn’t taken that nap.

In one study, for example, Olaf Lahl found that

“An ultra short period of only 6 min of napping is already sufficient to significantly boost declarative memory performance beyond waking control levels.”

You read that right. Even a SIX MINUTE nap helped participants recall more words.

But wait: there’s a problem.

We know that good night-time sleep is essential for consolidation of long-term memories. (Here’s a great article on the subject.)

It seems plausible to me that an afternoon nap might feel good at the time, but might make it harder to sleep at night.

If that’s true, then the short-term benefit of the nap will be more than offset by the long-term detriment of a bad night’s sleep.

In other words: I might remember that list of words better after the nap, but I might be likelier to forget everything else.

This uncertainty has always held me back from recommending naps.

The Nap Research Problem, Solved

Researches in Jintan, China looked at the cognitive results of napping — and their method fixes this research problem.

They gathered nap and night-time sleep data from 363 6th graders. And, they tested them on a variety of cognitive functions: executive control, spatial memory, and complex cognition among them.

What did they find?

First: frequent nappers get better nighttime sleep than infrequent nappers.

Yup: naps didn’t make it harder for these 6th graders to sleep. In fact, they slept better.

Second: frequent nappers did better on a variety of the cognitive tests. For instance, they did better on tests of sustained attention. (In schools, we require A LOT of sustained attention).

They also did better on tests of non-verbal reasoning.

In brief: frequent naps don’t make it harder to sleep at night, and they do improve some cognitive functions. Win win!

Nap Research in Context

This study’s authors wisely note two key limitations.

First, the data on sleep come from self-reports. This method, alas, allows for participants’ faulty memory to skew the results.

Second, the study took place within a particular cultural context. Naps are a cultural norm in China. That norm just might have an influence on the relationship between napping and cognition.

We just don’t know.

(To think more about the important of context, consider the perils of WEIRD neuroscience.)

For me, this study’s specific findings about cognitive capabilities are interesting. However, its general finding that naps don’t interfere with nighttime sleep means that the other studies about naps’ benefits can be taken at face value.

So: you’d like to take a 6 minute nap? GO FOR IT!

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