Mother always said to get sleep before an exam...

Hello again! You know how in high school your teachers, your principle, and your mother would stress how important it was to get a good nights rest before a test? Well it turns out they weren't just making that up! The Science Daily recently published an article referring to a study performed on animals that tested their "electrophysiological and molecular changes" after being shown some sort of visual stimuli. The article goes into quite a bit of detail about how the brain works and different enzymes and ion channels. Personally, I don't really find all the technical terms that interesting, but what I did find intriguing was that basically in order to form memories, calcium in the brain has to turn on different enzymes. The study showed "that these enzymes never really turned on until the animal had a chance to sleep." This shows that you have a higher chance of remembering most of the information that you just crammed into your head the night before the exam if you just sleep on it. One downfall in the article however, was that they didn't test the animals' ability to recall the information. The scientists said that "It's a mechanism that [they] think underlies the formation of memory," meaning that they are getting closer to understanding not only how memories work, but how the brain functions as a whole. The most important thing to take from this article is that if you really need to retain important information (for midterms perhaps), get a good night's sleep. I know how tempting it is to pull an "all-nighter", but don't! You'll be thankful the next day when you are well rested, and who knows, you might remember a thing or two.

Check out the article at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090211161934.htm