Untertitel: WDR mediagroup digital GmbH im Auftrag des WDR
Felicitas has a full day ahead of her.
And her brain has a tough job to do.
It has to make sure
that she learns the things that she absolutely has to know.
But before this, Felicitas' brain
still has to process unpleasant experiences from yesterday.
If you carry on like this, Felicitas, you'll fail.
How does it go again? I can't do it...
While she sleeps, Felicitas' brain tries to solve problems
that she grappled with the day before.
It connects new information with things
she has known for a long time.
Alarm clock
When we wake up in the morning, it seems like we've only been sleeping
and that our brains have been sleeping too.
Our brains never sleep.
Our brains are always active, always awake.
What do they do while we sleep?
They process everything we experienced while we were awake
during the day again while we sleep.
They make new connections, store things, recode things,
things are really processed, new connections made,
put in relation to other things, analysed.
Linked to emotions and feelings.
This is why it is often the case that I have a problem,
and try and try, thinking about it a lot.
And I can't find a solution.
I wake up in the morning and I have the solution.
But as soon as she wakes up, Feli already has the next problem.
The saleswoman in the shop showed her how it worked,
but now she's forgotten.
Nothing helps, she has to learn it from the beginning.
While Feli figures out how to tie her new wrap-around top,
a certain network of nerve cells is activated in her brain.
Learning changes these cells.
They get much more input than otherwise.
So many more nerve impulses arrive here than normally do.
This gets the learning process in Felicita's brain going.
The flood of impulses changes the cells involved in learning.
They react more sensitively than otherwise.
Every incoming impulse triggers not one new impulse in the next cell,
but several.
The flow of information between the cells is boosted in this way.
The connections between them get stronger and stronger over time.
A real network is created.
This happens every time the brain learns something:
The signal transmission between the nerve cells gets better and faster.
When we learn,
lots of centres in the brain are active at the same time.
But one region plays a key role and coordinates the whole thing:
the hippocampus.
This is located in a deeper layer of the brain.
When we learn, this ensures the correct interplay
between the nerve cells.
Like the conductor of an orchestra.
The hippocampus organises incoming impulses and quickly passes them on.
In doing so, it makes it possible to learn at all.
Only if lots of impulses run quickly in the learning cells
can the connections between them get stronger.
Acute stress and negative feelings can really interfere with learning.
Any kind of stress,
whether it's from a class or somewhere else, is bad for learning.
If I learn something completely normal,
like a boring foreign word or something, while I'm scared,
then I learn the fear at the same time, so to speak.
And then when I recall this Latin or French or Spanish word again,
the fear will be there too.
When I'm scared, I'm no longer creative.
And if I learn something while I'm afraid,
then perhaps I'll remember it later, but I won't be creative with it.
Learning doesn't necessarily mean cramming in material.
Hey, Christian, really sweet of you to save me from stupid Lara today.
Even texting at breakneck speed was something Feli had to learn.
We learn something all the time.
We can't help it.
If knowledge or certain skills are stored in our brains permanently,
a real reorganisation takes place.
When we learn, groups of nerve cells join together to make networks.
The connecting points between the nerve cells,
the "synapses", get stronger.
The cells also form new synapses among themselves.
This fixes what we have learned more effectively in our brains.
There are lots of ways to learn something.
By watching and copying, for example.
This is how small children learn.
Brain researchers have found that certain nerve cells
are particularly important for this.
They carried out an experiment using guitar chords.
The test subjects lay in an MRI scanner,
so the researchers could watch their brains working.
They had to watch chords...
...and then copy them.
All of the brains reacted in a similar way.
Some of the nerve cells were active during the experiment,
they so called mirror neurons.
The test subjects only had to see the guitar chords
and these were already active.
But they were much more active
when the subjects copied the chords afterwards.
Researchers believe that it is these mirror neuron
that control learning by copying.
Learning by watching and copying is most important for children,
but this is how we learn our whole lives long.
No problem. You coming to the sports hall?
Our brains use different learning strategies.
Doing and trying things out for ourselves is particularly effective.
Like a Kinder Surprise without instructions.
I think I can do it.
It really works well for learning when we try to figure something out
for ourselves and, in trying, notice at first "this isn't so easy".
There's resistance, it doesn't work so easily.
Then we see "that's how it works".
Our brains are so cleverly built that whatever we understand
for ourselves is much more likely to stick
than something that we're just told by someone else.
Having an insight ourselves, is a good way to learn something.
Having a "eureka" moment ourselves is really good for learning.
Because these eureka moments speed up learning
and ensure that whatever we've learned sticks for a long time.
Later on, Felicitas does have to get on with it:
homework and learning.
No problem, because our brains are made for learning.
They want nothing else but to learn all the time.
And when we've learned and understood something,
our brains reward us for it.
When the penny drops and we've understood something,
a small region in the middle brain becomes active.
This releases the substance dopamine and sends it to the frontal lobe.
Here, the dopamine makes sure
that the new knowledge receives special attention and is stored.
At the same time, the dopamine goes to the reward centre of the brain.
Here, happiness hormones are released.
The result:
Juhu.
Understanding and successfully learning something makes us happy.
El Sopion? El Sopion?
Ah, snitch. Damn.
Memorising, on the other hand, is difficult for the brain.
Boring memorisation is something that our brains can't do at all
because this is actually treating our brains wrongly.
It's like sticking cling film over our mouths
and then wanting to speak.
Boring memorisation is not what we should do,
if we want to learn something.
If we have 20 spanish words in front of us,
we shouldn't just read through them until we know them.
But instead read them perhaps once or twice
and then cover them up, and then keep checking and testing.
We now know that the process of asking and actively seeking
is really important for learning.
We also know that if I move while I'm learning,
if I don't sit still, but perhaps even think up a hand movement,
like that's a pair of scissors, that's a piece of paper.
Then I'll learn quicker.
Three times quicker than if I don't do this, as we've found.
What's more, if I keep taking breaks between the learning processes,
it's better than if I try to learn everything at once.
If we know all of these things then we know how to learn effectively,
and can learn quicker.
There's one more trick for how to help our brains when we're learning.
Brain researchers have found out what really gets the brain working.
When learning vocabulary its craving for new things.
They showed test subjects pictures that they had never seen before.
Not special pictures.
The key factor was that the pictures were entirely new to them.
Then they had to memorise words.
They lay in an MRI scanner,
so the researchers could watch their brains working.
The subjects remembered the words much better
if they had seen the new pictures beforehand.
When we see something new, the brain releases dopamine.
If we learn something immediately afterwards,
this will stick in our memories more effectively.
El Sopion. Snitch...
Repeat once more, and then Felicitas calls it a day.
But for her brain, the learning isn't over.
It will carry on while she's asleep.
This reviewing process achieves a lot.
Firstly, it reinforces things.
So things are actually more fixed in my memory once I've slept on them.
While we sleep our brains process everything we experienced
while awake once again, which reinforces what we've learned.
So that essentially the information processing
that takes place during the day is repeated at night.
Which means that we reinforce what we've learned.
So after a good night's sleep, Felicitas will know a bit more.
What she's learned today, she'll have mastered tomorrow.
Copyright WDR 2012