Napping Can Make You Smarter
March 11th 2011 16:23
Taking a nap can give the brain a bit of a boost, according to a new study.
Imagine the brain is like a hard drive that needs downtime to resort data, or clear its cache. With that in mind, University of California at Berkeley researchers believe when people sleep there are “sleep spindles” working between key regions in the brain. The electrical impulses take fact-based memories from the brain's limited hippocampus to the prefrontal cortex, which acts like a hard drive.
These fast spindles of electricity come about during no-rapid eye movement sleep and can happen up to 1,000 times at night.
Call it a learning refreshment, one that the latest study determines even happens during napping.
The news release for the Berkeley study said researchers took 44 healthy young adults and tested their memory in a way to work the hippocampus hard.
After all performed at a relatively equal level, half were instructed to take a 90-minute nap and the other half stayed awake.
That evening they were tested again. Those who napped did better and their learning improved, as if sleep refreshed their memory capacity, the news release stated.
Electroencephalogram tests, which measure electrical activity in nappers' brains, showed the more sleep spindles nappers had the more ready they
“At a neuro-cognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap,” he said.
Medical research gives some pointers on napping, the Daily Mail stated.
Six minutes can clear out enough short-term memories to free up more space, according to a 2008 German study.
Twenty minutes takes a person through the first two stages of the sleep cycle. That slows the heart rate, increases alertness and concentration and improves the mood.
Lying down for 20 minutes works just as well.
Forty minutes is even better, as it lets someone move through one period of rapid-eye-movement sleep. That lets the brain go through the tidying-up process.
“Evidence shows that napping for this amount of time is also enough to rebalance the immune system and pep up energy levels,” Dr. Narina Ramlakhan, a sleep therapist at London's Capio Nightingale Hospital, told the Daily Mail.
Sleeping more than 45 minutes can move into a deeper sleep, which could produce feelings of inertia, grogginess and disorientation if awakened. But 90 minutes goes through one full sleep cycle.
FOX News said older people have less sleep spindles, which could mean sleep disruption is one reason people lose their memory as they age.
Walker told FOX News that his sleep research shows how important sleep is.
“Sleep is doing something very active for things like learning and memory,” he said. “I think for us as a society to stop thinking of sleep as a luxury rather than a biological necessity is going to be wise.”
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