A daytime nap enhances your memory
A brief bout of non-REM sleep (45 minutes) obtained during a daytime nap clearly benefits a person's declarative memory performance, according to a study published in the February 1 issue of the journal SLEEP.
The study, authored by Matthew A Tucker, PhD, of the Center for Sleep and Cognition and the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, discovered that, across three very different declarative memory tasks, a nap benefited performance compared to comparable periods of wakefulness, but only for those subjects that strongly acquired the tasks during the training session.
"These results suggest that there is a threshold acquisition level that has to be obtained for sleep to optimally process the memory," said Dr Tucker.
"The importance of this finding is that sleep may not indiscriminately process all information we acquire during wakefulness, only the information we learn well."
It is recommended that adults get between seven and eight hours of nightly sleep.
Those who suspect that they might be suffering from a sleep disorder are encouraged to consult their GP or a sleep specialist.
Adapted from materials from American Academy of Sleep Medicine,
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