Encouraging Health

Brain’s clean-up crew gets to work as soon as you doze off, study suggests

In a new study, German researchers have shown that if you nap just six sublime minutes during the day, it will not only make you feel better but will also improve your ability to learn and remember.

The connection between sleep and learning is something that researchers have only recently pinpointed, but many people know from their own experience — such as the mathematician who says he’s going to sleep on a problem and has a Eureka! moment upon nodding off.

But what wasn’t known was just how much shut-eye was needed to get an edge. To get a better sense of that, researchers from the University of Duesseldorf performed two experiments described in the March issue of the Journal of Sleep Research.

In both experiments, students were asked to review and memorize a list of 30 words. Afterwards, study participants were either allowed to play a videogame or to take a nap in a quiet room.

In the first, researcher compared 26 university students’ abilities to remember what they’d learned after a 50-minute nap or playing a video game. In the second, the allotted naps were shortened to 35 minutes or six minutes for another 18 students.

When researchers compared the groups, they found that nap takers consistently remembered more words. On average, six-minute nappers remembered one word more than the video game players, while people taking the longer naps remembered two words more.

Benefits kick in quickly
The research suggests that most of the memory improvement is linked to changes that occur in the brain just as you start to doze off, said Olaf Lahl, a researcher at the Institute of Experimental Psychology at the University of Duesseldorf and the study’s lead author. “These processes remain active for a certain time period even if sleep is terminated shortly thereafter,� he said.

Sleep experts were surprised that just six minutes of snoozing could lead to better learning and memory. “You can’t argue with data,� said Dr. Mark Mahowald, director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis and a professor of neurology at the University of Minnesota Medical School. “Still, this is a small group of individuals and it needs to be replicated.�

The results may help scientists get a better handle on just what happens when we go to sleep, said Matthew Tucker, a researcher at Harvard University School of Medicine and the Center for Sleep and Cognition at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

For more articles like this, browse Encouraging Health.

catnap, sleep, memory improvement

catnap, sleep, memory improvement