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When actor Alan Alda was 11, he wondered what a flame was. He asked his teacher who told him a flame was “oxidation.” Not exactly helpful, Alda said. “That’s like calling it by another name,” said Alda. “‘A flame, that’s Fred.’” That frustrating moment decades ago resulted in something great—the Flame Challenge, in which scientists compete to accurately and succinctly explain a simple question like “what is a flame?” in a way that an 11-year-old can understand.
In four years, 2,000 scientists have sent in entries to the Flame Challenge, and 70,000 kids have judged the entries. This year’s contest centered on the question What is sleep? The 2015 winners (one for written explanation, one for video explanation) were revealed on Sunday, May 31 at the World Science Festival in a program that also brought scientists onstage to explain the myriad ways that sleep is essential to our lives.
First among the presenters was Robert Stickgold, a Harvard University sleep researcher, who talked about different stages of sleep. Most people are probably familiar with REM or rapid eye movement sleep. REM sleep is one of the more interesting phases of sleep. When in it, your brain paralyzes your body—unless you happen to have REM sleep behavior disorder, which removes that hold and allows you to act out your dreams.
“It can sound like it’s fun, but it’s not,” said Stickgold. Imagine dreaming that you’re being chased by a monster, which causes you to leap out of bed and run away—straight into the nearest wall!
Stickgold also talked about how the advantages of sleep go beyond just resting. Sleep is actually conducive to improvement at a number of things—whether it’s a menial task in a laboratory experiment (like typing the same number sequence over and over again, as Stickgold made Alda attempt onstage) or playing a musical instrument. We improve with practice, but after a nap or especially a good night’s sleep, we can improve even more.
“Few of us think about what’s actually happening in our brain when we ‘sleep on it,’” Strickgold said. “Yes, it’s true that practice that makes perfect … but it’s really practice with sleep that makes it perfect!”
Matthew Wilson, an MIT researcher who listens in on the brains of rats using tiny electrodes thinner than human hairs, explained the intimate links between sleep and memory. In his experiments, Wilson was able to suss out brain activity from sleeping rats that resembled their activity while running through a maze. He was also able to induce certain memories (like turning left or right at a crossroads) by playing sounds during the actual waking activity, then playing the same tone during sleep. Sounds, it turns out, are one thing that always makes it through to the brain.
Washington University School of Medicine researcher Paul Shaw also examines memory and sleep, but in fruit flies. When adult fruit flies are deprived of sleep, they forget the lessons they’ve learned (namely, not to go into a chamber with a nasty-tasting coating on the walls). A nice nap restores their memory, and they avoid the foul chamber. But when baby fruit flies are deprived of sleep, even for just one night, they can’t learn to avoid the nasty chamber–even if they’re allowed to sleep as much as they want when they’re adults.
“When your brain is developing, if you don’t get enough sleep, your brain is not doing what it needs to do to make you healthy,” Shaw said. “When you’re young, and your brain is changing rapidly, you need more sleep.”
Brown University researcher Mary Carskadon explained how we’re all suffering from “social jetlag,” thanks to the fact that we all stay awake much later in the modern electrified era. “Think about human sleep before we had electric lights,” Carskadon said. “We might have had candlelight, oil lamps, but when the sun went down, so did we.”
To avoid this jet lag, Carskadon recommended putting up bright lights in the morning, and putting away the brightly lit screens well before bedtime.
Explaining scientific concepts to 11-year-olds is a delicate balance; you want to be thoroughly informative without sounding stale, and entertaining but not condescending. The two Flame Challenge winners this year balanced those goals expertly.
Eric Galicia took the top prize in the video category:
And Brandon Aldinger won for his written entry, which explained in part that:
Although there’s still some mystery as to exactly why we sleep, we know that our body takes care of two big things while we’re sleeping. First, our brain organizes what it learned while we were awake. Your brain is made up of billions of cells called neurons. These neurons are connected in a huge network. While we sleep, our brain strengthens and rearranges these connections to help us remember things more quickly and easily when we are awake. So, the next time your mom or dad yells, ‘Wake up! It’s time to go to school!’ you can explain to them that you were actually still studying from yesterday!
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