Researchers say that getting enough sleep time each night may do more than just allow you to rest for the next day; it may also improve your memory and creativity, as well as help you plan things more clearly and efficiently.

For many years, experts have been suggesting that sleep sufficient hours each night, as well as napping, contribute to boosts in various cognitive functions, but the new work brings proof that this is the case.

The investigation shows that the correlation holds true for people who nap and also experience rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep.

When they were woken up and subjected to a task demanding them to come up with new ideas, those who napped and had REM sleep proved to be better able to combine ideas in new, innovative manners.

The research was conducted by investigators at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD), who were led by psychiatrist Sara Mednick. She was also the author of the new study.

The new findings were presented on Friday, at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. The study included REM and non-REM sleepers, as well as people who rested during the experiments without sleeping.

“When you imagine future events, you're recombining aspects of experiences that have actually occurred,” says for National Geographic News Daniel Schacter.

The expert is based at the Harvard University, where he holds an appointment as a psychiatrist. He was not directly involved in the new investigation.

“Nobody really knows [how sleep influences the brain]. But I suspect there might be a connection. After all, dreams are a different way of recombining aspects of past experience,” he adds.

Schacter explains that studies he conducted showed that certain areas of the human brain were equally as active during sleep as they were when performing their daytime operations.

One good example is the hippocampus, which is active in memory formation, and which lights up on functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans, during sleep.

REM sleep “plays a role in helping people detach their memory of that word from being able to use that word in other contexts,” Mednick concludes.