It might be time to consider taking your pillow to work as researchers have found that a short sleep in the middle of the day can improve your capacity for learning and retaining new facts. Although, good luck explaining that to your boss when they catch you snoozing at your desk.
Researchers in California have found that power napping not only refreshes the mind but actually makes you smarter, the UK’s Daily Mail reported.
The University of California, Berkeley, research team split 39 students into two groups and then set them a series of learning tasks that were designed to test the hippocampus region of the brain, which is used to store facts.
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Midway through the day, half the students took a 90-minute siesta and half didn’t. For the tests taken later that afternoon, the half who had slept were found to perform much better in the later tasks than those who had not.
“Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness but, at a neuro-cognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap,” said Dr Matthew Walker, the psychologist who led the study.
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The researchers suggested that sleep — especially the transitional period between deep sleep and dreaming sleep known as stage 2 non-REM — is needed to clear out the brain’s short-term memory allowing it to take in new facts.
“It’s as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full and, until you sleep and clear out those fact e-mails, you’re not going to receive any more mail,” Dr Walker said.
“It’s just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder.”
The findings will come as no surprise to those with an interest in history (or the siesta-loving Spanish for that matter) as many great thinkers and leaders are known to have been keen nappers.
British prime ministers Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher were both advocates of a midday sleep as were former US presidents Bill Clinton and John F Kennedy as well as physicist Albert Einstein, the Daily Mail reported.
Your say: Do you feel better after a midday snooze or like you need even more sleep? Share your experiences below.
