Before you dismiss a midday nap as a sign of laziness, you may want to learn about a recent study suggesting that it may be just the thing to make you smarter.
The study done at the University of California shows that an hour's nap can boost your brain power. In the study, healthy young adults who were allowed to sleep for 90 minutes midday actually performed better than those who did not. Their performance also improved from their baseline testing, suggesting that they also got smarter.
As we spend time awake for a prolonged period of time, we have more difficulty learning new information. It is thought that sleep is needed to clear our short-term memory storage in an area of the brain called the hippocampus to make room for new information. This transfer of information is thought to occur in one of the basic sleep stages called stage 2.
It is rather interesting to think that we are just beginning to learn the function of sleep.
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