Originally posted on November 13, 2014. Success is mystery. What is it? How do we achieve it? And why does it often fail to live up our expectations? Success puzzles us because we don’t appreciate failure. In “What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars,” University of Kentucky alum and multimillionaire Jim Paul and Brendan Moynihan suggest that there are a million ways to succeed. If you want to earn more money, you can start a business or sell a business. To improve your mental health, you can get hired or resign. One person’s path to weight loss will be paved with fruit and no fat; another person’s caveman diet will encourage fat consumption to lose weight. The point is that there are at least as many ways to succeed as there are people on the planet. This is good and bad news. The good news is that everyone can find a unique path to success. The bad news is that your unique path won’t teach you much about success. To learn how to succeed, you must learn why you fail and how to avoid it. This topic is near and dear to my heart. Last weekend, I completed the Javelina Jundred 100 mile ultramarathon. It was my best race yet. I knocked well over an hour off of my personal record time. Throughout the race, I felt good and ran a steady pace. After the race, I was happy and calm. (For proof, see my finishing picture.) Failure was the key to my success. Two times earlier this year, I failed to finish 100 mile races. Both times I got sick and the medical team pulled me. Last weekend, I didn’t focus on how to run faster. Instead, I concentrated on how to avoid the things that caused me to lose out on finishing those earlier races. By learning from failure, I could achieve my definition of success.  I don’t know why failure is great learning medicine. One reason is that bad is stronger than good. When we fail, it grabs our attention more than success. Others argue that there are only a few ways to fail. Either way, failure is a great teacher that we should embrace instead of fear. ... View more

Originally posted on February 5, 2015. Even though the smartphone has only been around for the past seven or eight years, it’s sometimes difficult to remember what life was like before we had so much information at our fingertips. You could argue with a friend about what year “Back to the Future, Part 2” came out, or in what year the “future” was set. (It was released in 1989. The future, filled with flying cars and floating skateboards, was set in 2015.) Back then, you couldn’t resolve discussions by swiping a screen and touching a button. Siri wasn’t even a twinkle in Steve Jobs’s eye. If you got lost, you had to consult a map or stop and ask for directions, and if you got bored while waiting in line, you couldn’t pass the time by playing Candy Crush or perusing Instagram. Luddites argue that life was better before the smart phone, whereas others tout the benefits of instant communication and information. But one thing is certain: The smartphone has changed our lives. And our thumbs. Yes, when we spend time on smartphones using a touchscreen, it changes the way our thumbs and brains work together, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Our obsession with smartphones presented the perfect opportunity to explore the everyday plasticity of our brains. With smartphones, we are using our fingertips—especially our thumbs—in a new way, and we do it a lot. And because our phones keep track of how we use them, they carry a wealth of information that can be studied. In the study, the research team used electroencephalography (EEG) to record brain response to the touch of the thumb, index finger, and middle fingerprints of touchscreen phone users compared to people who still use flip phones or other old-school devices. They found that the electrical activity in the brains of smartphone users was enhanced when all three fingertips were touched. The amount of activity in the brain’s cortex associated with the thumb and index fingertips was directly proportional to the amount of phone use. Repetitive movements over the touchscreen surface might reshape sensory processing from the hand. Cortical sensory processing in our brains is constantly shaped by personal digital technology. So, the next time you use your thumbs to tweet, answer email, or jot yourself a note, remember that you’re training your brain. Keep in mind, too, that excessive phone usage is linked with motor dysfunction and pain. Remember the so-called “BlackBerry thumb”? ... View more

Originally posted on April 16, 2015. Our brains are amazing. I am endlessly fascinated by how the brain works. In nearly every interview I do, the reporter asks, “What part of the brain lights up when that happens?” Now reread the previous sentences. As you came upon each word, how did you read them? Did you look at each letter and arrange it into a word? Have you ever thought how we read? How can we skim so quickly through a passage and absorb its contents? Our brains don’t look at letters. So says a new study. Instead of seeing a group of letters, our brain sees the entire word as an image. Neurons in our brain’s visual word form area remember how the whole word looks, using what one researcher called a “visual dictionary.” Researchers tested their theories by teaching 25 adult participants a set of 150 nonsense words and investigating (using fMRI) how the brain reacted to the words before and after learning them. The results: The participants’ visual word form area changed after they learned the nonsense words. Pretty cool stuff. But, it’s also useful. Knowing how our brains process words could help us design interventions to help people with reading disabilities. People who have trouble learning words phonetically might have more success by learning the whole word as a visual object. Pavelen/E+/Getty Images ... View more

At the 2016 Stanford Psych One Conference, Linda Woolf (Webster University) suggested that during the Intro Psych learning chapter we talk about Hero Rats. This is a very nice way to help students see an example of the contributions psychological science is making to promote human rights around the world.   After covering operant conditioning, show Bart Weetjens 12-minute 2010 TED talk, How I Taught Rats to Sniff Out Land Mines (below). (Why rats, other than they are easy and cheap to train? They are too light to set off the mines.) In the second half of his talk, Weetjens discusses his new work on training rats to detect tuberculosis.   Video Link : 1669   Alternatively, show students this 11-minute 2007 Frontline segment on Hero Rats. Before you play it, inform students that there is an error in the video. Can they identify it? [In the video, the conditioning is called classical/Pavlovian, but it's actually operant. The rats are clicker-trained. The rats learn that when they hear a click, they can run to a location, such as back to their trainer, to get a tasty treat. The click is a discriminative stimulus - "that sound is my cue to go get a snack".]   This website provides a nice written explanation of the process used to train the rats.   Is your class, psych club, or honor society looking for a project? Consider raising funds to support Weetjeens organization, Apopo.   Besides, Gambian (aka African) pouched rats are pretty darn cute. Even if (or because) their bodies can be a foot and a half long with a tail that matches their body length. (Photo source: Gambian pouched rat - Wikipedia) ... View more

Originally posted on September 24, 2015. This past weekend, I gave myself an odd birthday present. I entered an ultramarathon. If you’ve read my posts, you know I like to run. For my birthday, I wanted to run 100 miles as fast as I could. Luckily, I had a perfect opportunity. There was a 24 hour running race within driving distance of my house. There was a bigger purpose in my run. I could determine whether a recent test of my speed and endurance would replicate. Two weeks ago, I ran 100 miles in 22 hours and 10 minutes. Replication is important. It tells whether repeating the essence of an experiment will produce the same result. The more the same sequence of events produces a similar outcome, the more we can depend on it.  Psychology is embroiled in a current debate about replicability. All psychologists agree that replication is important. That is a requirement before you get your card when you join the psychologist club. The debate centers on the meaning of non-replication. A recent report found that 64 percent of the tested psychological effects did not replicate. Some have declared a war on current scientific practices, hoping to inch the non-replication rate down to a less newsworthy percentage. Others, such as Lisa Feldman Barrett, argue that non-replication is a part of science. It tells us just as much about why things do happen as to why they don’t. My birthday run had everything I needed to make a replication attempt. Nearly everything was identical to the last time I ran 100 miles. The course consisted of a flat, concrete loop that was nearly one mile long. I ate the same foods, drank the same amount of water, and got the same amount of sleep the night before. All signs pointed to an exact replication. Then the race started. The first 50 miles breezed by. I was over an hour faster than my previous run, but I felt pretty good. By mile 65, I was mentally fatigued. By mile 70, my body was exhausted. By the time I hit mile 75, I was done. Less than 16 hours had passed, but I was mentally and physically checked out. No replication. There are at least two ways I can deal with this non-replication. The first is to panic. Either the people who counted my laps at the previous race did something wrong, I reported something wrong, or something else is wrong. It is as if it never happened. The next time someone asks me my personal record, I can tell them. But I must tell them that I don’t trust it. “Probably just a one-off,” I might say. “Tried to replicate it two weeks later and came up short.” A second approach is to try to understand what contributed to the non-replication. Most things were the same. But some things were different, among them the wear and tear that long running has on the body and mind. Maybe I wasn’t fully recovered from the previous race. Maybe I ran too fast too soon. Or maybe I’m just not that fast. Either way, it tells us a different story about replication. Replication science is possible, but we will always have non-replications. And those non-replications aren’t badges of shame. They tell us as much about the complexity of human psychology as the truth about how certain situations make us think, feel, and act. It would be great if psychology’s non-replication rate dwindled to less than 5 percent. I doubt that will ever happen. Humans are squirrely animals. No matter how much we want to do the same thing twice, sometimes it doesn’t happen. ... View more

Originally posted on May 2, 2014. Many faculty fret over students’ in-class use of computers—ostensibly there for note taking, but often also used for distracting e-mail, messaging, and checking social media.  A soon-to-be-published study by Pam Mueller (Princeton University) and Daniel Oppenheimer (UCLA) offers faculty an additional justification for asking students not to use computers. In three experiments, they gave students either a laptop or a notebook and invited them to take notes on a lecture (a TED lecture in two of the studies).  Later, when they tested their memory for the lecture content, they found no difference in recall of factual information.  But taking notes in longhand, which required participants to summarize content in their own words, led to better performance on conceptual-application questions. “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard” is the apt title for their article, to appear in Psychological Science. “Participants using laptops were more inclined to take verbatim notes,” explained Mueller and Oppenheimer.  Better to synthesize and summarize, they conclude:  “laptop use in classrooms should be viewed with a healthy dose of caution; despite their growing popularity, laptops may be doing more harm in classrooms than good.” For one of my colleagues, this study, combined with the unwanted distractions of in-class computer use, inspires a new class policy:  for better learning, no computer use in class. ... View more

Originally posted on August 26, 2014. In a recent New York Times essay (here), Henry Roediger explains the insights gleaned from his research on “the testing effect”— the enhanced memory that follows actively retrieving information, rather than simply rereading it. Psychologists sometimes also refer to this phenomenon as “test-enhanced learning,” or as the “retrieval practice effect” (because the benefits derive from the greater rehearsal of information when self-testing rather than rereading). As Roediger explains, “used properly, testing as part of an educational routine provides an important tool not just to measure learning, but to promote it.” For students and teachers, I offer a 5-minute animated explanation of the testing effect and how to apply it in one’s own study.  (I intend this for a class presentation or viewing assignment in the first week of a course.) See Make Things Memorable!  How to Study and Learn More Effectively. ... View more

Originally posted on September 5, 2014. Feeling stressed by multiple demands for your time and attention?  Daniel Levitin, director of McGill University’s Laboratory for Music, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University and author of The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, has some suggestions.  In a recent New York Times essay, he advises structuring our day to give space both for undistracted task-focused work and for relaxed mind-wandering: If you want to be more productive and creative, and to have more energy, the science dictates that you should partition your day into project periods. Your social networking should be done during a designated time, not as constant interruptions to your day. Email, too, should be done at designated times. An email that you know is sitting there, unread, may sap attentional resources as your brain keeps thinking about it, distracting you from what you’re doing. What might be in it? Who’s it from? Is it good news or bad news? It’s better to leave your email program off than to hear that constant ping and know that you’re ignoring messages. Increasing creativity will happen naturally as we tame the multitasking and immerse ourselves in a single task for sustained periods of, say, 30 to 50 minutes. Several studies have shown that a walk in nature or listening to music can trigger the mind-wandering mode. This acts as a neural reset button, and provides much needed perspective on what you’re doing. As one who is distracted by a constant stream of e-mails and the temptations of favorite web sites, this is advice I should take to heart.  But I have benefitted from an e-mail system that diverts e-mails that come to my public e-mail address (including political fund-raising appeals and list mail) from those that come to a private e-mail address known to family and colleagues.  The public e-mails are sent my mail only at the day’s end. I also find it helpful to take work out to coffee shops, including one that doesn’t have Internet access.  “They should charge your extra for that,” observed one friend. In our upcoming Psychology, 11th Edition, Nathan DeWall and I offer some further advice: In today’s world, each of us is challenged to maintain a healthy balance between our real-world and online time. Experts offer some practical suggestions for balancing online connecting and real-world responsibilities. • Monitor your time. Keep a log of how you use your time. Then ask yourself, “Does my time use reflect my priorities? Am I spending more or less time online than I in­tended? Is my time online interfering with school or work performance? Have family or friends commented on this?” • Monitor your feelings. Ask yourself, “Am I emotionally distracted by my online inter­ests? When I disconnect and move to another activity, how do I feel?” • “Hide” your more distracting online friends. And in your own postings, practice the golden rule. Before you post, ask yourself, “Is this something I’d care about reading if someone else posted it?” • Try turning off your mobile devices or leaving them elsewhere. Selective attention—the flashlight of your mind—can be in only one place at a time. When we try to do two things at once, we don’t do either one of them very well (Willingham, 2010). If you want to study or work productively, resist the temptation to check for updates. Disable sound alerts and pop-ups, which can hijack your attention just when you’ve managed to get focused. (I am proofing and editing this chapter in a coffee shop, where I es­cape the distractions of the office.) • Try a social networking fast (give it up for an hour, a day, or a week) or a time-con­trolled social media diet (check in only after homework is done, or only during a lunch break). Take notes on what you’re losing and gaining on your new “diet.” • Refocus by taking a nature walk. People learn better after a peaceful walk in the woods, which—unlike a walk on a busy street—refreshes our capacity for focused attention (Berman et al., 2008). Connecting with nature boosts our spirits and sharpens our minds (Zelenski & Nisbet, 2014). ... View more

Originally posted on November 11, 2014. A  recent Beijing visit left me marveling at students’ academic enthusiasm.  In explaining Asian students’ outperformance of North American students, researchers have documented cultural differences in conscientiousness. Asian students spend more time in school and much more time studying (and see here for one recent study of the academic diligence of Asian-Americans). The Beijing experience gave me several glimpses of this culture difference in achievement drive and eagerness to learn.  For example, as I dined more than a half hour before speaking at the Peking University psychology department, word came that 160 students were already present.  After my talk in the overfilled auditorium (below), student hands across the room were raised, with some waving hands or standing up, pleading to be able to ask their questions.  And this was a Friday evening. Later that weekend, I met with teachers of AP psychology, whose students at select Beijing high schools pay to take AP courses in hopes of demonstrating their capacity to do college-level work in English, and thus to gain admission to universities outside China.  Several of the teachers were Americans, one of whom chuckled when explaining that, unlike in the USA, she sought to demotivate her overly motivated students, encouraging them to lighten up and enjoy life. The plural of these anecdotes of culture difference is not data. (My China sample was biased—high achieving students who had gained admission to the most elite schools.) But the experiences, which replicated what I experienced in a 2008 visit to Beijing, were memorable. ... View more

Originally posted on March 4, 2015. When was the last time you studied without distractions? Or did any one activity without simultaneously doing another? Multitasking pops up everywhere. While we work, we check our phones for messages, tweet our thoughts, listen to music, and update our Facebook status. At least that’s what my students tell me they do in their other classes. You may think listening to music while you prep for a big test helps you relax so you can concentrate and study. I used to think so. In college, I’d sit down with my textbooks, pop in my headphones, and turn on my favorite music to set the mood for studying.  Then I’d spend hours going over the material—and play my make-believe drums or air guitar! Yes, I studied alone in college. A lot. Listening to music may help college-aged students stay focused, but one new study found that older adults had more trouble remembering information they had learned while music was played in the background. The study challenged younger and older adults to listen to music while trying to remember names. For the older adults, silence was golden. But when the researchers made the older adults listen to music while they tried to remember the names, their memory lapsed. College-aged participants’ performance did not suffer regardless of whether they listened to music while memorizing names. Before you turn up the tunes to study, consider your age first. If you’re a younger college student, keep pressing play. Older students might be better off studying in silence. Regardless of our age, we might do well by taking a few minutes each day to set aside distractions, slow down, and become mindful of our thoughts, feelings, and environment.  ... View more

Originally posted on February 2, 2016. You’ve likely heard the NPR ads for brain fitness games offered by Lumosity. “70 Million brain trainers in 182 countries challenge their brains with Lumosity,” declares its website. The hoped-for results range from enhanced cognitive powers to increased school and work performance to decreased late-life cognitive decline or dementia. But do brain-training games really makes us smarter or enlarge our memory capacity? In our just-released Exploring Psychology, 10th Edition, Nathan DeWall and I suggest “that brain training can produce short-term gains, but mostly on the trained tasks and not for cognitive ability in general.” As an earlier TalkPsych blog essay reported, Zachary Hambrick and Randall Engle have “published studies and research reviews that question the popular idea that brain-training games enhance older adults’ intelligence and memory. Despite the claims of companies marketing brain exercises, brain training appears to produce gains only on the trained tasks (without generalizing to other tasks).” And that is also the recently announced conclusion of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), when fining Lumosity’s maker, Lumos Labs, $2 million for false advertising. As FTC spokesperson Michelle Rusk reported to Science​, “The most that they have shown is that with enough practice you get better on these games, or on similar cognitive tasks...There’s no evidence that training transfers to any real-world setting.” Although this leaves open the possibility that certain other brain-training programs might have cognitive benefits, the settlement affirms skeptics who doubt that brain games have broad cognitive benefits. ... View more

If you make candy bars and sell them through vending machines, you can use operant conditioning principles to get people to do all sort of things. In this case, Nestlé, the maker of Kit Kat bars in Brazil, put special vending machines on two different college campuses in the same Brazilian city. The machines streamed video to each other. Players stepped up to each machine and pressed play (“jogar” in Portuguese). The goal? To win a staring contest. The winner earned a Kit Kat Chunky chocolate bar. Video Link : 1628 Bonus: If you’d like to expand your coverage of schemas to talk about differences in food preferences around the world, tell your students about the phenomenon that is Kit Kat, the most popular candy, in Japan. Ask your students to guess how many flavors of Kit Kat there are in Japan. The answer: almost 300 (Goldman, 2016). Some of the flavors: grilled potato, cherry blossom, soybean, blueberry cheesecake, chocobanana, white peach, green tea, pumpkin, apple, mango, lemon, red bean paste, apple vinegar, pineapple, kiwi, cappuccino, jasmine tea (The weird and wacky…, n.d.). Want to try out some of these flavors yourself? You can order some here. Why is Kit Kat so popular in Japan? One factor is probably because its name is similar to the Japanese phrase kitto katsu – good luck (literally, surely win) (Goldman, 2016). Goldman, R. (2016, May 13). Japan has a Kit Kat for every taste, and then some. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/14/world/what-in-the-world/kit-kat-japan.html The weird and wacky flavors of Kit Kat in Japan. (n.d.). Retrieved May 28, 2016, from http://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/worlds-weirdest-kit-kat-candy-bars/ ... View more

Contributed by Mark Gluck, author of Learning and Memory. Featuring Dr. Andrew Peter Mallon, CEO and Director of Research, Calista Therapeutics, and contributed by innovative teachers. Currently, my primary interest in connection with Learning and Memory is the discovery and development of new treatments that cure the diseases of learning and memory, either by protecting or regenerating damaged CNS cells, in diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, or by enhancing the capacity of the CNS to learn, in diseases like autism. Previously, I taught Learning and Memory for many years, whilst an Assistant Professor (Adj) at Brown University. In my view, the best lessons that can be taught are those that fundamentally inform students about the nature of their own psychology and how it works for and against them without their awareness. My two favorite classroom exercises explore two critical aspects of learning: conditioning and learned helplessness. In my classroom exercise on conditioning, I paired the ingestion of a very sweet, sugary substance (US) that elicits salivation (UR) with a distinctive sound (CS). I have used various sounds as the CS, including a dog-training clicker or saying ”test time” in my inimitable Scottish accent. The pairing can be performed during a normal lecture, and conditioning can quickly be established. Then, after the sugar is removed, the retention and extinction rate of the salivation response (CR) can be assessed in individuals. The association can be extinguished by pairing wasabi with the CS, but in the absence of intentional extinction, I have found that the CS–CR association can last weeks. For me, the real-life lesson from this observation is that it is equally possible to establish an association between a pleasant stimulus and a person: If you (CS) want to be liked by another person, you can pair your presence or your interaction with them with an agreeable US, such as a nice smile, eye contact, humor, friendliness, a compliment, or a bunch of flowers, chocolate, or other small gift. It is a reliable way to enhance one’s interactions with other people and can be remarkably effective. I used the standard impossible anagram experiment to induce learned helplessness in half of my class as a rapid way of demonstrating the power of that pathological psychological effect; however, I follow it up with a discussion that helps students differentiate pathological learned helplessness from the necessary realization that in some cases failure is inevitable. Learned helplessness is widely considered to be an important element of depression, and it is critical for students to understand it and to learn techniques to halt the downward cycles into learned helplessness that can stymie the treatment of depression. It is also important to distinguish between pathological learned helplessness, in which the person submits to failure in an achievable endeavor, and the reasonable recognition that some goals truly are unachievable. In the example I cite to demonstrate learned helplessness, a male student asks a young lady to the prom, is refused, asks another and is again refused, and becomes despondent and never asks another. I contrast that with the example of jumping off tall buildings while flapping one’s arms in the hope of flying, an endeavor in which one should submit to failure. The key to truly understanding learned helplessness lies in distinguishing what is really possible from what is impossible. ... View more

Written and contributed by Mark Gluck, author of Learning and Memory. Addicted to Love? Thinking about the object of his desire, Sam’s heart starts to pound, his palms get sweaty, and he feels excitement and anticipation. Denied access, he becomes irritable, has trouble sleeping, and develops an overwhelming obsession that swamps all other interests. Based on the above description, Sam might be a cocaine addict. Or he might just be passionately in love. Humans viewing pictures of their beloved show increased brain activity in areas including the dorsal striatum, the VTA/SNc, and the orbitofrontal cortex (Aron et al., 2005; Xu et al., 2010). These are some of the same brain areas activated by addictive drugs such as cocaine and amphetamine, and they are different from the brain areas activated by sexual arousal, indicating that romantic love is more than just a drive to obtain sex (Fisher, Aron, & Brown, 2005). Viewing pictures of a romantic partner can even produce pain relief, apparently by activating reward centers in the brain that overrule the simultaneous processing of pain (Younger, Aron, Parke, Chatterjee, & Mackey, 2010). If romantic love activates the same reward circuits as cocaine, can it be just as addictive? Individuals experiencing intense romantic infatuation can display behaviors reminiscent of drug seeking: pursuit of the beloved to the exclusion of other activities, obsessive and intrusive thoughts, and even impulsiveness and poor decision making—leading, for example, to crimes of passion (Frascella, Potenza, Brown, & Childress, 2010). On the other hand, just because romantic love shares some brain circuitry with cocaine and can elicit some of the same behaviors doesn’t necessarily justify calling love an “addictive substance.” Not everything that elicits reward-seeking behavior or that provokes withdrawal symptoms qualifies for that label. (You seek out water when you’re thirsty, and you experience distress if you go too long without; yet would you consider yourself “addicted” to water?) Many experts believe that the depression and grief that accompany a breakup are a normal part of life— not evidence of an addictive disorder. Nonetheless, some individuals do display excessive devotion to their beloved and experience severe withdrawal symptoms after romantic rejection, including clinical depression and (in rare cases) suicide or homicide. It is possible that, just as some individuals can try cocaine and walk away while others become pathologically addicted, so too some individuals can survive a painful breakup while others remain trapped in a state of loss. Debate continues regarding whether such individuals should be diagnosed with a pathological addiction (Reynaud, Karila, Blecha, & Benyamina, 2010). As research elucidates the brain substrates of drug addiction and suggests therapies (including medication) to reduce the cravings associated with drug withdrawal, should we consider using the same medications to help reduce cravings following romantic rejection? If you’ve ever had your heart broken by a failed romance, would you have taken advantage of such a treatment if it existed? ... View more

Written and contributed by Mark Gluck, author of Learning and Memory. It has long been assumed that sleep, beyond its role in rest and refreshment, also has a facilitating effect on learning and memory. After all, who doesn’t recognize the experience of working fruitlessly on a problem to the point of exhaustion, and then coming up with a sudden solution following a night of sleep? It is only over the last two decades that the effect of sleep on cognition has been studied in depth by the scientific community. This research has led to a growing understanding of how sleep affects learning and memory. A typical night of sleep includes cycles of alternating sleep stages, each characterized by a different profile of brain activity. In one of these stages, rapid-eye-movement (REM), or paradoxical, sleep,  the brain seems as active as when awake. This is the stage in which most dreams appear. Another stage, slow-wave sleep (SWS), or deep sleep, is characterized by highly synchronized brain-neuron activity and is the stage in which it is most difficult to wake the sleeper up. Recent research has combined sophisticated experimental designs, neuroimaging, and single-cell recordings to discover the relative impacts of the different sleep stages on various cognitive functions. It shows that SWS is mostly important for the consolidation of declarative memory, as well as for rule learning, spatial navigation, and insight. REM sleep, on the other hand, exerts its greatest effect on procedural memory. Some of the mechanisms by which sleep contributes to these functions are also becoming clear. During SWS, the hippocampus, a brain region involved in episodic and associative learning, ”replays” some of the waking experiences acquired during the previous day. The replay allows the new memories to be reorganized into a more efficient structure and also contributes to their assimilation into the general knowledge store of the individual. This reorganization is reflected as better performance the following day. Many questions are still unanswered. For example, the mechanism by which REM sleep facilitates learning and memory remains somewhat less characterized in comparison to that of SWS. However, the rapid advancements in this field hold out promise that the years to come will bring a fuller account of why the third of our lives we spend sleeping, a seemingly wasteful behavior from a learning–memory perspective,  is in fact not wasted at all. FURTHER READING Stickgold, R., & Walker, M. P. (2005). Memory consolidation and reconsolidation: What is the role of sleep? Trends in Neuroscience, 28, 408–415. Diekelmann, S., & Born, J. (2010). The memory function of sleep. Nature Review Neuroscience, 11, 114–126. ... View more