Sciencespeaking topic
Sleep and memory consolidation: what we learn during the day is made permanent in sleep as it transfers from the hippocampus to the cortex. So does pulling an all-nighter before an exam actually stop us from saving what we learned?
— memory consolidation and hippocampal replay
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- The sunk cost fallacy: why do we sit through a movie we dislike just because we paid for the ticket? Why does what we spent in the past hold our future hostage?
- Why is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle a fact about nature itself rather than a limitation of our measuring instruments?
- The insula and inner awareness: the insula reads internal signals like our heartbeat and gut and turns them into feelings. When we say I have a bad feeling inside, is intuition really a brain region reading our body?
- When you put your hand on a table you never actually touch it. Atoms don't make contact; their electrons only repel one another. Everything we call 'solid' is almost entirely empty space. So then, what is 'touching'?
- In a swamp the fireflies at first blink out of step, but after a while they all begin to flash at the same instant; no one is the conductor. How does synchrony arise spontaneously out of chaos?