Psychologists Georg and Pilzecker are pioneers in this field. They found that people unconsciously process the information and materials they learned during the day when they sleep.
I often tell my classmates that you should ferment your knowledge in your mind. In order to fully ferment knowledge, you must have a high-quality sleep. So I never advise my classmates to stay up late.
The generation of new memories is very dependent on the hippocampus. However, as time goes on, memory begins to rely mainly on the cerebral cortex, so the dependence on the hippocampus will become less and less.
This is not to say that knowledge has moved from one place to another. On the contrary, over time, people tend to use long-term memory and associate it with other memories. The picture below describes the formation of memory in the brain.
At first, short-term memory relied heavily on the hippocampus. But after sleep and repeated output training, these memories are transferred to the cerebral cortex.
In the above picture, pay attention to the three pictures in the last row (awake-sleep-awake): the hippocampus is very active in the awake state, indicating that we are producing memories. When we rest, the neurons in these hippocampus are no longer active. When we go back to the last three pictures (awake-sleep-awake), you will find that neurons in our cerebral cortex are active during sleep.
This is the positive significance that sleep brings to learning. Take it away. No, thanks! I am an international IB/AP/Alevel/IGCSE course practitioner and an international education observer, Mr. Zhou. This is my 26th article.