💡 "Sleep, unfortunately, is not an optional lifestyle luxury. Sleep is a non-negotiable biological necessity." — Matt Walker
How many hours of sleep do you usually get? Do you think it's enough?
Have you ever had a period of poor sleep? How did it affect your mood and performance?
Do you think modern life is fundamentally incompatible with good sleep? Why?
Is pulling an all-nighter ever worth it? Have you ever done it?
What do you think happens in the brain while we sleep?
A tired person resting their head on their hand at a desk
A person lying awake in a dark bedroom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MuIMqhT8DM
TED 2019 — Matt Walker, "Sleep is your superpower" (≈19 minutes).
✍️ Open Cloze — Fill in the gaps with ONE word only (from the video transcript)
Read the text and think of the word which best fits each gap. Use only one word in each gap.
Let me start (1) _ _ _ _ _ the brain and the functions of learning and memory. What we've discovered (2) _ _ _ _ _ the past ten or so years is that you need sleep after learning to essentially (3) _ _ _ _ _ the save button on those new memories so that you don't forget. But recently, we discovered that you also need sleep before learning to actually prepare your brain, almost like a dry sponge ready to initially (4) _ _ _ _ _ up new information. Without sleep, the memory circuits of the brain essentially become waterlogged, (5) _ _ _ _ _ it were.
And when you put those two groups (6) _ _ _ _ _ to head, what you find is a quite significant, 40% (7) _ _ _ _ _ in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep. We've gone (8) _ _ _ _ _ to discover what goes wrong within your brain to produce these types of learning disabilities. There's a structure that sits on the left and the right side of your brain, called the hippocampus. You can think of the hippocampus almost (9) _ _ _ _ _ the informational inbox of your brain — very good at receiving new memory files and then holding (10) _ _ _ _ _ to them.
