Friday, December 07, 2007

The Night Shift

It's pretty well accepted that sleep is good for learning. (As previously discussed by me.)

Last night I had my first final in Sports Law. Every semester I have post exam stress disorder, most frequently in the form of dreams, as I've described here and here. I felt pretty excellent coming out of this final, and there was very little anxiety over it.

Nevertheless, last night I distinctly remember being in a quasi-sleeping/dreamlike state: I was rehearsing the names of cases from Sports Law and reviewing what they held. To me this represents direct evidence of my brain at work while I sleep! Amazing!

The best part is that I half-woke from this midnight review and, aware of what I was doing, promptly scolded myself: 'That final is over! No need to learn those cases, kid.'

2 comments:

Dave said...

Yeah, I had one of those recently. It was after Con Law. I blogged about it here:

http://traditionalnotions.blogspot.com/2007/12/law-school-is-mad-mad-mad-world.html

I'm having some difficulties this semester getting re-invigorated for the next exam once one is done. It feels so anti-climactic to just go and pick up a new casebook after you finish one subject.

Oh, well.

Sansserif said...

I feel like exam'ing is mentally cathartic; I feel like my brain is doing a physical memory dump, like a computer. I can feel the expanded space in my brain.

Good luck with the rest! Con Law definitely takes up a big portion of brain-RAM.