Afternoon Nap Boosts Study Skills By 20 Percent

A new study found that 100 minutes of sleep could boost memory skills significantly.

By Kathryn Hawkins. Posted on March 10 2011

Have a big test or a presentation coming up late in the day? Better make time for a nap before hitting the books: According to a new study, a little snooze time can boost your memorization skills tremendously.

Researchers at University of California, Berkeley, asked a group of volunteers to participate in a memorization task the morning, then a second one in the evening. Some of the subjects were given a quiet room to take a 100-minute nap in during the afternoon, while others were not. The difference was stunning: The nappers scored an average of 20 percentage points higher than those who didn’t have the sleep advantage.

“It’s not simply enough to sleep after learning,” study co-author Matthew Walker told LiveScience. “It turns out you also need to sleep before learning.”

The study found that our mental abilities slip dramatically as the day wears on if we’re not allowed an opportunity to rest up: Non-nappers did 12 percent worse on the evening test than they did in the morning session. In contrast, those who were able to sleep showed a 10 percent improvement on the evening test compared to their performance that morning.

Walker and his fellow researchers believe that electric charges known as “sleep spindles” that occur during NREM sleep are responsible for the dramatic boost. The spindles work to transfer freshly-gained knowledge from the hippocampus, where memories are made, to the prefrontal cortex, where long-term memories are stored.

“It’s almost like clearing out your informational inbox of your e-mail so you can start to receive new e-mails the next day,” he said.

So if you want to get ahead, make the time for a nap. “Sleep is doing something very active for things like learning and memory,” says Walker. “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.”

Filed under: Health and Wellbeing, Science,

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