Had lunch? Feeling Drowsy? Go ahead…Do not think twice. According to a new research, napping not only brushes up your mind but also makes you smarter.
Dr Matthew Walker, a psychologist at the University of California, who led the study, said: taking a power nap or Sleep for that matter not only corrects the wrong long-drawn-out sleeplessness but, at a neuro-cognitive level, it moves one beyond where one was before he took the nap.
He has presented the preliminary findings on Sunday, Feb. 21, at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego, Calif.
What happens when your email inbox is full? You cannot receive new mail and the new mail bounces back. Well, that’s exactly what happens with your brain too. “It’s as if the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full, and, till you sleep and clear out all 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.”
In the recent UC Berkeley sleep study, 39 healthy young adults were separated into two groups – nap and no-nap.
At noon, all the participants were subjected to a strict learning task meant to tax the hippocampus, a region of the brain that helps store fact-based memories. Both groups performed at comparable levels. About 2 p.m. the nap group took a 90-minute snooze
while the no-nap group remained awake. Later in the day, at 6 p.m., participants performed a new round of learning exercises.
Those who took the siesta performed better than those who stayed awake. The most recent study suggests that the brain may need sleep to process short-term memories, thereby, making “space” for new facts to be learned.
Walker stated, “Hypothesis that sleep is needed to clear the brain’s short-term memory storage and make room for new information.”
So get refreshed and become smarter with the power naps.