A midday nap boosts the brain's learning capacity

If you see a student dozing in the library or a co-worker catching 40 winks in their cubicle, don’t roll your eyes. New research from the University of California, US, shows that an hour’s nap can dramatically boost and restore your brain power. Indeed, the findings suggest that a biphasic sleep schedule not only refreshes the mind, but can make you smarter.

Conversely, the more hours we spend awake, the more sluggish our minds become, according to the findings. The results support previous data from the same research team that pulling an all-nighter decreases the ability to cram in new facts by nearly 40 per cent, due to a shutdown of brain regions during sleep deprivation.

“Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap,” said Matthew Walker, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and lead investigator of the study.

For the study, 39 healthy young adults were divided into two groups – nap and no-nap. At noon, everyone was subjected to a rigorous learning task intended to tax the hippocampus, a region of the brain that helps store fact-based memories. Both groups performed at comparable levels. At 2 pm, the nap group took a 90-minute siesta while the no-nap group stayed awake. Later that day, at 6 pm, participants performed a new round of exercises. Those who remained awake throughout the day became worse at learning. In contrast those who napped did better and actually improved in their capacity to learn.

“It’s as though the email inbox in your hippocampus is full and, until you sleep and clear out those fact emails, you’re not going to receive any more mail. It’s just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder,” said Walker, who is presenting his preliminary findings at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego, USA