Get a good night’s sleep after piano practice: It may prove crucial to learning new skills such as tickling the ivories. Scientists have long known that adequate sleep is important for forming different types of memories. People can do better on a test with proper rest than by pulling an all-nighter, for example. But learning motor skills involves a different part of the brain, and often a lot more practice, than memorizing facts. Is sleep important for that, too? Very, German scientists report. Scientists at the University of Lubeck taught healthy young students different finger-tapping sequences, and then either let them sleep or kept them awake for eight hours. When […]
Here’s another reason to get the kids to bed early: More sleep may lower their risk of becoming obese. Researchers have found that every additional hour per night a third-grader spends sleeping reduces the child’s chances of being obese in sixth grade by 40 percent. The less sleep they got, the more likely the children were to be obese in sixth grade, no matter what the child’s weight was in third grade, said Dr. Julie Lumeng of the University of Michigan, who led the research. If there was a magic number for the third-graders, it was nine hours, 45 minutes of sleep. Sleeping more than that lowered the risk significantly. […]