Pour la science - Actualité - Lire Kafka favoriserait l'apprenti. La lecture de Kafka est à bien des égards déroutante. L’absurde, le surréalisme ou l’absence de repères logiques y sont omniprésents. Travis Proulx et Steven Heine, de l’Université de Santa Barbara en Californie, ont montré que le vide de sens parfois ressenti renforce, par contrecoup, la quête de logique dans les minutes qui suivent cette lecture. Ils ont fait lire à des volontaires des extraits du Médecin de campagne, puis ont soumis les lecteurs à une épreuve d’apprentissage où ils devaient assimiler les règles d’une grammaire artificielle, créée pour les besoins de l’expérience. Ce type de test mesure la capacité d’un individu à mémoriser de nouveaux rapports logiques entre des symboles. Les personnes ayant lu Kafka mémorisent mieux et plus rapidement ces règles grammaticales. Elles manifestent un besoin de détecter des systèmes de signification dans les textes qu’on leur présente, et le font avec plus d’acuité.
Selon T. C’est donc notre besoin de sens que Kafka met à rude épreuve. A better way to remember. Scientists and educators alike have long known that cramming is not an effective way to remember things. With their latest findings, researchers at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan, studying eye movement response in trained mice, have elucidated the neurological mechanism explaining why this is so. Published in the Journal of Neuroscience, their results suggest that protein synthesis in the cerebellum plays a key role in memory consolidation, shedding light on the fundamental neurological processes governing how we remember. The "spacing effect," first discovered over a century ago, describes the observation that humans and animals are able to remember things more effectively if learning is distributed over a long period of time rather than performed all at once. Explaining this observation, the researchers found that the spacing effect was impaired when mice were infused with anisomycin and actinomycin D, antibiotics which inhibit protein synthesis.
Sleep Accelerates the Improvement in Working Memory Performance. Kenichi Kuriyama1,2, Kazuo Mishima1, Hiroyuki Suzuki1, Sayaka Aritake1, and Makoto Uchiyama3 +Show Affiliations Correspondence should be addressed to Kenichi Kuriyama, Department of Adult Mental Health, National Institute of Mental Health, National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, Ogawa-Higashi, Kodaira, Tokyo 187-8502, Japan. kenichik@ncnp.go.jp The Journal of Neuroscience, 1 October 2008, 28(40): 10145-10150; doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2039-08.2008 Abstract Working memory (WM) performance, which is an important factor for determining problem-solving and reasoning ability, has been firmly believed to be constant. However, recent findings have demonstrated that WM performance has the potential to be improved by repetitive training. Although various skills are reported to be improved by sleep, the beneficial effect of sleep on WM performance has not been clarified.
Introduction Materials and Methods Participants Working memory task Figure 1. Study protocol. Figure 2. Performance measures Results. Faire la sieste doperait les capacités mentales, Sociét&e.