Dear User of SuperMemo,

If I was to bet on the top two factors that hinder learning in industrialized nations, these would be (1) stress and (2) poor sleep:

  1. Stress takes away your focus, stifles creativity and can contribute to the second factor: poor sleep
  2. Sleep is needed for establishing and optimizing memories. Without it, you cannot even experience the sense of a "good day"

Health is important too, but it is stress and bad sleep that affect nearly everyone, and take the largest toll.

For healthy people, all other factors in learning seem to be somewhat secondary. Self-discipline improves greatly if you are rested and happy. The fun of learning follows. The way you approach learning, tools and techniques, the way you represent knowledge in your mind, they can all be improved gradually and consistently. If you are on a steady path ahead, success is nearly guaranteed. Metaphorically speaking, your brain comes with a solid warranty of progress that you can easily void with stress and poor sleep.

The simplest test that can be a powerful predictor of a success or failure in learning is to ask a question: Do you like learning? If the answer is "yes", you own your future. If the answer is: "I love learning", you own THE future. Just make sure learning does not become an addiction that leads to learning for the art sake.

Given the importance of sleep, unless you are a "natural" and never get a bad night sleep, you should understand the basics of sleep physiology and the impact of your sleep habits on learning. Moreover, even if you sleep well today, you are always in danger of ruining your sleep patterns through the use of computers, Internet, mobile phones, SuperMemo, etc. In short, our brains have not got enough time to evolve and adapt to the stimuli of the modern lifestyle. That's why we witness an epidemic of sleep disorders in industrialized nations.

Today, you and I, got a unique chance to make a tiny step forward towards understanding how sleep affects learning, esp. in the context of learning with SuperMemo.

I would like to invite you to download and use SleepChart (a freeware applications that makes it easy to register the timing of your sleep). SuperMemo 2006 records the precise timing of each repetition in the learning process. We can combine data produced by SuperMemo and SleepChart, and reveal numerous relationships between sleep and learning! We can figure out your best time to learn, and your best time to sleep. How a bad night affects learning? What is the correlation between sleep length, sleep phase, or sleep timing and the learning results on the days that precede or follow the night in question? What is the impact of sleep on recall (recall tells you how well you bring things up from memory)? What is the impact of sleep on consolidation (consolidation tells you how well you store things in memory)?

Preliminary sleep&learning data processed earlier this year indicate that the link between sleep and learning is different and larger than originally expected. To be sure, we will need far more study and far more data. And here is a chance for you to make your contribution, as well as to learn something about yourself! In a few months, I will invite you to send in your own sleep and learning data generated by SleepChart and SuperMemo. I hope to be able to produce individual assessments for a few dozens of most interesting cases. Your contribution will be particularly precious if you are on any kind of a crazy sleep schedule: short sleep, irregular schedule, shift work, polyphasic experiment, etc. The messier your sleep, the greater its research value. In addition to the research value of your data, if I manage to generate an individual assessment for you, you can boost your understanding of your own sleep and learning. 

If this research program is as successful as I predict, it should even affect future versions of SuperMemo. Yes, I have been saying that for a few years now, but, you may know, there is a substantial opposition to making SuperMemo yet more complex. Therefore, if I can demonstrate black-on-white, how important sleep data is for optimizing the learning process, integrating those basic self-research tools in SuperMemo will become easier to push through.

Your all work with SleepChart will require just 3-5 clicks per day, your contribution may be invaluable, and there is also a potential benefit for your own learning progress. If this sounds convincing, please follow the instructions:

Instructions

Thank you in advance for your contribution!

Have a smashing time learning this summer.

Piotr Wozniak, July 14, 2007