How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

by Benedict Carey

naps of an hour to an hour and half often contain slow-wave deep sleep and REM.

each of sleep’s five stages helps us consolidate learning in a different way.

concentration doesn’t exist, or isn’t important. It’s that it doesn’t necessarily look or feel like we’ve been told it does. Concentration may, in fact, include any number of breaks, diversions, and random thoughts.

When we describe ourselves as being “lost” in some class or subject, that sentiment can be self-fulfilling, a prelude to failure or permission to disengage entirely, to stop trying. For the living brain, however, being lost—literally, in some wasteland, or figuratively, in The Waste Land—is not the same as being helpless. On the contrary, disorientation flips the GPS settings to “hypersensitive,” warming the mental circuits behind incubation, percolation, even the nocturnal insights of sleep. If the learner is motivated at all, he or she is now mentally poised to find the way home. Being lost is not necessarily the end of the line, then. Just as often, it’s a beginning.