When young children sleep, their brains continue to learn. German researchers from the University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognition and Brain Sciences, in Leipzig, have confirmed this experimentally with babies between 9 and 16 months.
Neuroscientists showed the creatures images of objects while making them hear fictitious names associated with those images. To test not only their memory , but also their ability to create mental categories , some objects that looked like each other were given the same name.
Then a group of children napped between one and two hours, while the rest stayed awake in their stroller or playing in the living room. After this parenthesis, the results were conclusive: only those who had fallen asleep remembered the words linked to the images and were able to assign abstract categories to similar objects.
In addition, the babies were given an EEG during the experiment. This allowed us to observe that children's consolidation of knowledge was directly related to the so-called sleep spindle , a phase in which the nerves located between the thalamus and the cerebral cortex generate a rhythmic activity of 10 to 15 cycles per second. This activity decreases as we get older .
