How Your Crazy Covid Dreams Might be Helping You Learn As winter approaches, the days are shorter and nights longer. Besides spending time in self-reflection, now’s the time for plenty of naps and sleeping. As a result, you might find yourself having stranger dreams than usual. Some studies now suggest that such dreams may result in memory consolidation. They can also result in an ability to understand complicated experiences digested during the day. Lots of strange dreams during Covid Are you having lots of strange dreams during the Covid pandemic? When looking at a sample of 1091 Italian participants and asking for their self-reported experiences in slumber, one study found that “dream frequency, emotional load, vividness, bizarreness and length” were all rated higher during the pandemic when compared to a pre-lockdown period. You are not alone. Additionally, individuals noted a higher increase in “negative emotions” when assessing their dreams. Finally, predisposition to some factors, such as sensitivity to depression, were predictive of such “strange” dreams. Dreaming to learn Tufts University neuroscientist Erik Hoel suggests that these dreams may be a process our brains go through to learn. His reasoning? Well, we know that dreams are amalgamations of experiences that we have throughout our days. Dr. Hoel believes that due to the monotonous nature of our lockdown experiences, our brains may be trying to create novelty in our subconscious minds to help us glean insights from what would otherwise be routine experiences. Therefore, these strange dreams may serve as intelligence in our working memory to teach us from new experiences, whether real or imagined at night. Practice makes perfect While these researchers try to make sense of the bizarre and unanticipated externalities of a global pandemic, many different hypotheses are coming into play when analyzing dreams. Another assumption is that dreams are ways our brains allow us to practice responding to real-life situations that have not yet occurred. Thus, the more you can “practice” in your dream, the more you can be prepared to perform in real life. What’s weird? Despite there not being one consensus when it comes to why we are experiencing dreams that are “strange” during Covid, there is a lot of interest in the field of understanding such experiences. As a result, the concept of “overfitting” is an idea that has permeated circles of scientists asking why we dream the way we do. This concept argues that dreams are weird because if they weren’t, we’d never be able to get new insights into our daily lives. Dreaming strange dreams might be normal, just as much as learning, whether you expect it or not, can be. Either way, your crazy Covid dreams might be helping you learn!
There are many different reasons to love flash cards. Maybe you haven’t found your reason to love flashcards yet and think they are very boring. Here are some of the reasons that we love flashcards and thing that you should too. Let’s start off with why flashcards are important. There are tons of articles online talking about flashcards and what they can do for you as a student. In case you missed all these great articles, check out our list of reasons to use flashcards… Study flashcards burn information into the brain as they engage active recall. They aid in spaced repetition. If you’re unfamiliar with the idea of spacing in learning, it basically involves spacing learning events apart rather than massing them together. They activate metacognitive faculties. An example of this is when you believe something to be true and suddenly find out that it isn’t true. Because the answer shocked you, it has become ingrained in your memory and has deepened the learning association. This type of self-reflection is known as metacognition. They are a method of self-testing. They enhance retention. They improve comprehension skills. They allow for visual learning. With improved learning comes better exam results. Now that you know the importance, it is time to make flashcards! There is a great article online titled “8 Ways to Create Better Flashcards”. Here is some ideas from this great article: Use Pictures. For best results use pictures with words. More is Better. Create a variety of cards of the same thing to help you remember it in different ways. Keep it Simple. Sometimes you may be tempted to group things together in categories. This makes it harder to remember stuff. Try to keep the cards to 1 thing instead of grouping them together. When you’re right, you’re right. Sometimes you have words that are synonyms. As long as you get one of them, call it a win. Eventually you will remember both words. Opposites Attract. Don’t let them. Using phrases like the opposite of hot is _____ are a bad idea. This will not help you remember the words. It will only confuse you. Keep it Short. Keep your questions simple and direct. Our brains are lazy will try and find the easiest way to remember the thing on the card and forget the rest. Learn, then memorize. Understand what you’re teaching yourself before you memorize it. Be careful with corrections. If you use cards like ones that have you fix the error, your mind may remember the error in the future instead of the correct thing. There are many ways to make using flash cards fun. A fun article “Becoming a Flash Card Master” lists cool ways to make flashcards more fun. One of the things this article talks about it using a scorecard to keep track of scores while playing games with the flashcards to make it more interesting. Make a game out of flashcards and have a competition to see who can get the highest score! Here are 5 games they wrote about: The Magic Show The Quick Flip The Hint/ Gesture Game The Slow Reveal The Pictionary
