3 of 52

Home. Home Sunday night at 10. Yakisoba for lunch, sunshine, walk to Scarecrow. Two coffees and one nap. About 20% unpacked. Tired, physically and emotionally. But home.

I barely finished Nurtureshock, my 3 of 52, before I had to leave Little Rock.



I'd heard of this book on NPR, I guess, and had wanted to read it for a while. The authors compile tons of research about children (infants through teenagers) which they, as parents and writers, found "shocking" and counter-intuitive. Not all of it was counterintuitive or new to me, but a great deal of it was, and as a parent and an educator, I did find all of it to be interesting.

One of my favorite research chapters was the chapter on the importance of sleep. One section of the chapter showed how strongly a child's capacity for memory is affected by the amount of sleep the child gets. Even more interesting, though, is what they found about emotional memory:

Perhaps the most fascinating, the emotional context of a memory affects where it gets processed. Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories gets processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories, yet recall gloomy ones just fine.

In on experiment by Walker, sleep-deprived college students tried to memorize a list of words. They could remember 81% of the words with a negative connotation, like "cancer." But they could remember only 31% of the words with a positive or neutral connotation, like "sunshine" or "basket".

And with that, GOODNIGHT.