Category: Study habits & Distractions

The most frequently made comment by Chem 201 students is that they learn to study organic chemistry as the semester rolls along. Please read that again. They don’t say, ‘they learn o chem’ because that’s a given. What they say instead is, they ‘learn to study o chem.’ Nearly everyone who takes 201 spends some time struggling to discover and cultivate beneficial study habits.

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For years I have issued this advice to Chem 201 students before each exam, “Don’t stay up too late studying,” I say. “It doesn’t help. You need to get good sleep in order to make good long-term memories.” I have repeated this message over and over again not because I’m a “Mommy” who hates to see exhausted students working on o-chem exams (although I do hate to see this), but because my dim appreciation of sleep research has been that the science supports my advice.

So I was pretty excited when I saw an article in the 6 June 2014 issue of Science magazine that helps explain the relationship between sleep and memory. “Memories – getting wired during sleep” (p. 1087) reports how researchers have found a way (p. 1173) to observe changes in nerve fibers (in mice) that occur when the mice learn a new task. Specifically, the researchers examined the number and location of “dendritic spines.” These spines are structures that form in specific locations on a nerve fiber as a mouse improves its ability to perform particular tasks. Sleep promotes the formation of spines (and also improved task performance) while sleep deprivation prevented spines from forming (and also reduced task performance).

Neurophysiology is not my field, but these results are really exciting. Imagine being able to see structural changes in individual nerves that are associated with learning! And also discovering that sleep is essential for these changes to occur. Very, very cool.

And, of course, that advice of mine: if you really want a good score on the next exam, study. Then get to sleep. Good sleep.

Reed chemistry alum and medical school student, Hassan Ghani ’08, just sent me this story from yesterday’s NY Times, “How to get an A- in Organic Chemistry” by Barbara Moran. Like so many others, Ms. Moran has decided a mid-life career change is in order, but her search for professional fulfillment has taken an unusual tack: at the tender age of 42, and with parental responsibilities for two small children, she finds herself enrolled in organic chemistry so that she can become a doctor.

Her story about the joys of “orgo” includes observations on the necessity of mastering electron pushing (draw a “zillion” curved arrows and you will eventually develop the kind of “intuition” that makes a poorly placed arrow seem as unpleasant as “ketchup on sushi”), similarities in the type of reasoning (“inductive generalization”) used by organic chemists and doctors, and the all-important life lesson that, even though our life compass points towards the Land of Perfection, it is not a place that we can ever visit.

After a long afternoon or night of studying organic chemistry do you sometimes wake up the next day with little or no recall of what reagent does what? If that happens a lot, it may be that your sleep pattern is to blame.

Scientists have learned that several types of memory require sleep for consolidation. That is, to move a memory from the short-term neural pathways that are getting rewritten every few seconds to the long-term networks that last for days and weeks one needs adequate sleep (and several types of sleep). 5 or 6 hours just doesn’t cut it. Even 7 hours night after night can get in the way of learning.

To learn more about how sleep controls your ability to remember and perform at your best, listen to this Science Friday episode: Science of Sleep: How Sleep Affects Your Memory (Feb 8, 2013).

And the next time you look at your parents (or they look at you) and think, “how could you forget?”, it might just be insufficient sleep that is to blame.

I recently wrote about the importance of carrying information forward. And I'm sure that you understand by now that the information we cover needs to be applied and not just regurgitated. But there's so much to learn. Is it possible that mere humans can learn organic chemistry?

Yes. And here is why:

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This post has nothing to do with o chem, but I think watching 5000+ small Vaux swifts swarm and then roost in the Chapman School chimney is one of the best FREE displays of urban wildlife you will ever see. Fortunately, the timing and location are perfect for Reed students. Head towards the Chapman Elementary school in NW Portland (#15 Bus will get you very close) on any night in early-mid September. Arrive about 30-60 minutes before sunset (7:00-7:30 arrival during Labor Day weekend) if you just want to see birds. Or, bring a picnic and a ball if you want to hang out in the park next to the school before the birds put on their show. The warm late-summer evenings are perfect for an outdoors off-campus adventure.

This event is not to be missed

Some helpful info for swift viewing:

Directions: The chimney is located at the west end (hilly side) of Chapman Elementary school. The school is located next to a park on NW 25th between NW Pettygrove & NW Raleigh. After you see the swifts, you can walk over to NW 23rd for dessert – many many establishments will be happy to serve you between 8-10 PM. Map
Best viewing: Get there about 20 minutes before sunset and watch the birds collect and feed. It takes awhile for all of them to go into the chimney so you'll be there after sunset (full moon tonite). Most people watch from the hillside on NW Pettygrove, but be kind to the neighbors.
Portland Audobon web info

I’m fascinated by how our brains and minds work. We like to think of them as loyal computers, reliably eating up the information we provide, and then issuing the ideas and directions we need to guide our lives. Long before we get to college, we have learned to trust our thoughts as showing us how “things really are,” and our plans and decisions as the way “things should be.”

Of course, from time to time, little breakdowns tell us that our brains and minds aren’t as reliable as we think (if this sounds circular, it should). A song gets “stuck” in my head. No matter how hard I try to stop thinking about it, I can’t. Or, a careful plan that I make for my evening goes awry when a conversation or a visit to the internet gets out of hand. What happened? Where’s my will-power? My self-discipline?

Even when these things happen, I may draw the wrong conclusions. I’m so committed to the “computer” model of how my brain works, I might just see these events as occasional malfunctions, something like the software conflicts that hang up my computer from time to time. However, an article, “Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?” (NY Times Sunday Magazine, Aug 21, 2011) by John Tierney reveals that our brains are not the robot-like bits of gray matter that we expect them to be. Thoughts do not logically flow from input data. Instead, an array of factors like time of day, blood sugar level, physical and mental fatigue, the number of decisions that have already been made that day, all influence how our brain operates. A simple decision like, “I should do the next thing on my to-do list: study, arrange a meeting, sleep, exercise, wash my clothes,” can be subverted by factors that we are barely aware of.

Note: The Tierney article opens with a description of Israeli court decisions and how they vary with time of day. For more on this, see “Extraneous factors in judicial decisions,” S. Danziger et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 108, 6889 (2011).