Trying to cram the brain with information during an 'all-nighter' before an exam is a ritual for many high school, TAFE or university students.
But most brain scientists say putting in long hours trying to pack in facts and figures is counterproductive, disrupting the steady absorption that's key to long-term learning.
Research at the University of California, Berkeley, that involved brain scans of students taking law school-prep courses shows that intensive training in reasoning skills actually does change the microscopic structure of the brain.
The results show that the training improves students' reasoning ability by strengthening connections between the right and left hemispheres of the brain.
The changes were recorded in scans of 24 high-school students or recent university graduates before and after 100 hours of exam prep over a three-month period. Compared with brain scans of a matched group of 23 young adults who got no training, the trained students developed increased connectivity between the frontal lobes of the brain and between the frontal and parietal lobes.
Another study shows that cramming that sacrifices a student's normal amount of sleep is usually counterproductive to good academic performance the next day.
Other research shows the average teen in Year 8 sleeps 7.6 hours a night, but by senior year, that snooze average falls to 6.9 hours. Yet the ideal amount of adolescent sleep is considered to be 8-9 hours a night.
Scientists have long known that sleep is essential for memory formation, and that some portion of the sleep cycle is key for transferring short-term memories from the brain's hippocampus to the long-term memory of the neocortex.
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