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Last Updated: Mar 11th, 2011 - 15:30:48 |
Napping may in fact make you smarter in addition to being more well rested. A recent survey found that napping before a memory test helped participants to score higher, leading researchers to take a closer look at the "power nap."
"It really seems to be the first evidence that we're aware of that indicates a proactive benefit of sleep," study co-author Matthew Walker, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, told LiveScience.
"It's not simply enough to sleep after learning," Walker said. "It turns out you also need to sleep before learning."
Study participants who took a 100-minute nap before launching into a memorization task scored an average of 20 percentage points higher on the memory test compared with people who did the memorization without a snooze first.
Researchers asked 44 volunteers to memorize 100 names and faces. Then, half of the volunteers were asked to nap for nearly two hours while the other half stayed awake. A short while later, both groups were asked to memorize another set of faces and names. They were all tested on their memory.
Volunteers who didn't nap did about 12 percent worse on the evening test than they did on the morning test. Those who caught some shut-eye did 10 percent better on the evening test than on the morning test.
The research highlights the importance of sleep. Researchers say sleep disruption could be one reason for memory loss in old age.
"Somewhere between infancy and early adulthood, we abandon the notion that sleep is useful," Walker said. That needs to change, he said: "Sleep is doing something very active for things like learning and memory. 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."
