A new study from Saarland University in Germany, suggests that brief sleep or short naps during the day can significantly improve memory retention and potentially boost brain power.
The researchers found that even sleeping for short periods lasting from 45 minutes to 60 minutes produces a five-fold improvement in information retention and retrieval from memory.
To reach their findings, study leader Alex Mecklinger, of the Experimental Neuropsychology Unit at Saarland, and his team enrolled 41 participants to take part in a learning task. Participants were shown a list of 90 single words and 120 unrelated word pairs. They were then asked to learn and memorize these words.
The word pairs used were unrelated to eliminate a possibility of familiarity. "A word pair might, for example, be 'milk-taxi.' Familiarity is of no use here when participants try to remember this word pair because they have never heard this particular word combination before and it is essentially without meaning. They therefore need to access the specific memory of the corresponding episode in the hippocampus," explained Mecklinger.
They grouped the participants into two groups namely the nap group and the control group. They discovered that the control group whose participants watched DVDs while the other group slept performed worse than the nap group when they were asked to remember the word pairs.
The group focused on the role of the hippocampus in memory retrieval. "We examined a particular type of brain activity, known as "sleep spindles," that plays an important role in memory consolidation during sleep," researcher Sara Studte explained.
Sleep spindles are bursts of oscillatory brain activity visible on an (electroencephalogram ) EEG that occurs during stage 2 sleep.
"A short nap at the office or in school is enough to significantly improve learning success. Wherever people are in a learning environment, we should think seriously about the positive effects of sleep," he said in a release.
