Power naps have been said to be good for health and now a new study revealed that these short bursts of sleep during the day lead to a five-fold improvement in memory functions including information retrieval thereby significantly improving learning success.
Published in prestigious journal “Neurobiology of Learning and Memory”, the research highlights the positive effect of sleep with power naps lasting for just 45 to 60 minutes having the capacity of improving memory by five-folds.
“Wherever people are in a learning environment, we should think seriously about the positive effects of sleep,” said professor and study supervisor Axel Mecklinger of Saarland University in Germany.
In the study, the control group watched DVDs and performed significantly worse than the nap group when it came to remembering certain word pairs such as milk-taxi.
To exclude the possibility that the subjects remember exclusively on the basis of familiarity feelings of the learned things, researchers used a trick: Participants were required to learn 120 word pairs that make no sense on top of the 90 individual words.
“Such a pair of words, for example, ‘Milk Taxi’. A familiarity feeling good is in the case, nothing at all, when the subjects were asked to recall the words because it does not make sense, they have never heard the word combination before. So you have to rely on the specific memory for each episode in the hippocampus,” explains Axel Mecklinger the method.
“The memory performance of the participants who had a power nap was just as good as it was before sleeping, that is, immediately after completing the learning phase,” Mecklinger said.
The researchers were particularly focussed on the role of the hippocampus – a region of the brain in which memories are “consolidated”, that is, previously learned information is transferred into long-term memory storage.
“We examined a particular type of brain activity, known as ‘sleep spindles’, which plays an important role in memory consolidation during sleep,” said researcher Sara Studte.
A sleep spindle is a short burst of rapid oscillations in the electroencephalogram (EEG). The stronger a person’s memory of something, the greater the number of sleep spindles appearing in the EEG.
“We suspect that certain types of memory content, particularly information that was previously tagged, is preferentially consolidated during this type of brain activity,” added Mecklinger.
A concentrated period of learning followed by a short relaxing sleep is all that is needed to enhance information recall, the study said.
