14 DAY TRIAL // It would appear that the advices many parents give their children, of sleeping for a couple of hours in the afternoon each day, are actually founded in some solid science. According to a new research, napping in the afternoon may be a foolproof way of consolidating memories, and also of clearing your mind of excess information that you don't need. By refreshing your brain in this manner, you could become a lot more capable of learning new things in the same day, after you wake up. And the upside is that only one hour of sleep during the day is needed to achieve this effect, LiveScience reports.
The same paper shows that if we do not take a break from our activities, then our minds tend to become sluggish from the excess data they hold, and therefore hinder our ability to learn new things as the day nears its end. “Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap,” explains University of California in Berkeley (UCB) psychology professor Matthew Walker, who is also the author of the new study.
To test the new hypothesis, the researchers devised an experiment in which 39 healthy individuals were assigned to either a nap, or a non-nap group. At 12 pm, the participants were subjected to a learning task, which exercised a fact-storing region of their brains called the hippocampus. At 2 pm, those in the first group were allowed to take a 90-minute siesta, during which time they took a nap, while the others were kept awake. At 6 pm, all participants had to undergo another learning task. It was here, researchers say, that the differences between the two groups became obvious.
Those who took a nap that day exhibited markedly better performances at learning, and even improved on their earlier capacities. Conversely, those who remained awake fared a lot worse than they did the same morning. The investigators say that both groups showed comparable results at the beginning of the study. “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. It's just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder,” the team leader concludes.