A Quick Nap During The Daytime Can Boost Your Memory By Five Fold

Sleeping well is known to improve mood and productivity. However, a new research suggests that taking a short nap during the daytime can dramatically improve a person's ability to retain information in the memory.

A team of researchers at the University of Saarland in Germany has claimed that a short nap of up to 45 minutes enhances the chances of data recovery from human memory by five times by facilitation preservation of little details and other acquired material in the memory. The team conducted their study on a group of 41 volunteers who were asked to feed certain words and word pairs into their memory. Next, the group was divided into two teams—the sleep group and the control group.

The sleep group was asked to take an hour long nap as the control group watched a DVD. After an hour, both the teams were tested for their memory of the words they were asked to remember.

The results revealed that the performance of the people who took the nap was five times than those who watched a DVD. In addition, the post-nap and pre-nap memory of the individuals remained constant even after an hour of sleep.

Further analysis of the hippocampus — the part of the brain that controls memory consolidation — using an electroencephalogram (EEG) showed that its ability to transfer learned information to memory storage is enhanced during the sleep.

“We examined a particular type of brain activity, known as “sleep spindles,” that plays an important role in memory consolidation during sleep,” said researcher Sara Studte, reported the Empire State Tribune. That is, the greater a man's memory of something, the more prominent is the sleep spindle in the EEG.

The study has been published in the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.

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