Study: Power-napping improves cognitive performance

by Stevie Smith - Feb 22 2010, 12:38

Despite the unlikelihood of bosses and teachers recommending that staff and students take brain-boosting power naps, a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, has revealed that snatching some daytime shut-eye can improve cognitive abilities.

The study was conducted across 39 healthy adults, with half having their brain performance tested before and after enjoying 90 minutes of sleep, while the remaining volunteers were subjected to the same tests without a session of checking their eyelids for holes.

According to the study results, those participants taking a siesta awoke and outperformed their sleep-deprived counterparts when their brains were put to the test, suggesting that a resting brain is able to better process short-term memory and create more room for new information.

“Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness, but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap,” outlined study leader Dr. Matthew Walker during the recent AAAS conference in San Diego, California.

“It’s as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full, and, until you sleep and clear out all those fact e-mails, you’re not going to receive any more mail,” he added. “It’s just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder.”

However, not everyone in the scientific community shares that belief, with some sleep experts claiming there’s no clear evidence to suggest daytime naps provide a person with more obvious brain benefit than when they simply get a good dose of sleep once every 24 hours.

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