It is the research employers with home-based staff have been dreading:
sloping off for 40 winks not only refreshes the brain, it can also
significantly boost a person’s memory.
Such is the reported finding of German academics who say the process of
nodding off – when the brain replays recent events – helps sharpen a
person’s ability to recall.
While deeper sleep is best for repairing faulty connections, a brief
cat nap lets our brains “figure out what to work on”, according to
details of the study, obtained by New Scientist.
Dr Olaf Lahl at the university of Dusseldorf, who led the study, said
the findings suggest that “much of sleep’s functional aspects” may be
“accomplished at the very beginning.”
In his study, he asked students to memorise a list of words and then
recall them after playing the card game solitaire for an hour.
Some of the volunteers had a five-minute doze at the start of the test, while the rest stayed wide awake.
The result was that students who napped remembered significantly more
of the words when they were asked to recall the list, than those who
had been constantly alert.
The indication that sleep can boost intellectual prowess will make
pleasant reading for Lady Thatcher and Bill Clinton, both former
premiers, who took half-hour power naps during their days in office.
But there was caution yesterday from Dr Jerry Siegel, a sleep expert at
California University. He warned: “It’s hard to imagine any aspect of
sleep onset that would not initiate a consolidation process that was
not then sleep-dependent.”
Feb 22, 2008
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