Task Performance School kids may be cutting back on sleep to finish ever mounting piles of homework, but it could be a self-defeating strategy. Harvard Medical School researchers have found that people who stay up all night after learning and practicing a new task show little improvement in their performance. And the study suggests that no amount of sleep on the following two nights can make up for the toll taken by the initial all-nighter.
Neuroscientists also theorize that higher forms of learning occur in the cerebral cortex.
Evidence from the study supports that theory. To Learn To Read Brain structure and hand preference may be as important as environment in influencing a child's ability to learn to read, according to a University of Florida Brain Institute study. The seven-year study of 39 Alachua County students from kindergarten to sixth grade indicates that while children from a lower socioeconomic class may be at risk for reading failure, the detrimental effects of environment are greatly increased in children with unusual brain asymmetry. In Certain Professions Shown To Have More Synapses Education not only makes a person smarter, it may generate a specific type of synapse in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, Illinois and Russian neuroscientists say. The parts of the brain that enable you to do a familiar task are different from those that learn that task, a new study confirms.