So you’ve just had lunch and are sitting in class or at your office desk. And now you’re fighting that overwhelming desire for a little nap. According to new research, a midday snooze would be the right thing to do. It can dramatically restore and even boost brain power afterward.
Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley took a group of 39 healthy adults and divided them, testing their learning ability with and without naps. The nappers performed significantly better and actually improved in their capacity to learn, according to the study.
Exactly why the nap effect works “is still a mystery,” according to Berkeley assistant professor of psychology Matthew Walker, lead investigator of the study. “One theory is that particular types of brain-wave patterns that occur during sleep help change the storage locations of recently stored information from short term to long term.”
He said the findings reinforce the researchers’ hypothesis that sleep is needed to clear the brain’s short-term memory storage — the hippocampus — to make room for new information.
