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Take that Nap! It May Boost Your Learning Capacity Among Other Good Things.

October 18, 2010 by Scott Barry Kaufman

Any­one who knows me knows that my favorite pas­time is nap­ping. In Col­lege, I would come back to my dorm room, and like clock­work, would take a nap. My best friend in Eng­land, who got quite a kick out of my pas­sion for nap­ping, once tried to per­suade me to drink a cup of tea after lunch instead of tak­ing my cus­tom­ary nap. I real­ly tried, but I soon gave in to my nap crav­ings. Some­times I feel like I real­ly need to re-charge my brain batteries.

Well, now sci­ence is on my side. I just love this new study, which was pre­sent­ed by Matthew Walk­er, assis­tant pro­fes­sor at UC Berke­ley, at the annu­al meet­ing of the Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion of the Advance­ment of Sci­ence (AAAS) con­fer­ence in San Diego this past Sun­day (Feb. 2010).

Walk­er and his col­leagues Bryce A. Man­der and Sangeetha San­thanam split up a batch of 39 healthy young adults into two groups. One group napped, the oth­er did not.

At noon, both groups took a learn­ing task thought to recruit the hip­pocam­pus. The hip­pocam­pus is a region of the brain known to play an impor­tant role in the for­ma­tion of new mem­o­ries. Over the past few years, var­i­ous researchers have found that fact-based mem­o­ries are tem­porar­i­ly stored in the hip­pocam­pus before oth­er regions of the brain can oper­ate on the con­tent, espe­cial­ly the regions of the brain respon­si­ble for high­er-order rea­son­ing and think­ing.  At this point in the exper­i­ment, both groups showed sim­i­lar lev­els of performance.

Then, at 2pm, the nap group took a 90-minute nap while the no-nap group stayed awake, pre­sum­ably watch­ing the nap group enjoy­ing their nap. After nap-time both groups then took more learn­ing tests. The nap­pers did bet­ter on the tasks than those who stayed awake, demon­strat­ing their high­er capac­i­ty to learn. [Read more…] about Take that Nap! It May Boost Your Learn­ing Capac­i­ty Among Oth­er Good Things.

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Filed Under: Brain/ Mental Health, Education & Lifelong Learning, Peak Performance Tagged With: brain, Brain-Fitness, Brain-health, Cognitive Neuroscience, creativity, Learning, Learning-&-The-Brain, Lifelong-learning, nap, Scott Barry Kaufman, sleep, sleeping

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