Boost Your Memory By Taking A Daytime Nap
A new study suggest that taking a 45-minute nap at daytime can boost your memory and help you remember what you studied. However, it will only take place if you learned it well.
Declarative memory is a type of human memory that stores facts, while procedural memory is for long-term skills or a memory for skills. According to the researchers, taking the daytime nap or sleeping can help set the declarative memories, which makes the facts you studied easier to remember.
Matthew A. Tucker is the lead researcher and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School’s Center for Sleep and Cognition. He said that, “sleep appears to have an impact on what is learned well, but not so much when on is not motivated to learn.”
A study was created requiring 33 people and a series of test: memorizing words, memorizing a maze, and memorizing a complex line drawing. The researchers had trained the 33 participants with certain declarative memory tasks. 16 of them took the 45-minute nap or non-REM nap and the 17 had to stay awake and watch a movie. On that same day, all the participants took the tests.
What Tucker’s team found wast that the three different declarative memory tasks, those that took a nap improved their performance compared to the one’s who stayed awake. But, a daytime nap would only work for people that learned their task well.
According to Tucker, “The nap group performed better overall than the awake group, but the difference wasn’t significant. However, when we looked at individual performance during training, we found those who did better during training benefited from napping.”
Tucker also said, “There is a likely basic level of learning that has to be attained before sleep can have an impact on performance.” And according to their study, the participants seem to perform well on one task, but not all of the three tasks.
He also said, “There is a lot of data starting to come in that there are benefits from naps on memory.” So, Tucker thinks that by taking a nap and if one has that motivation to learn what he studies, then napping may help improve the declarative memory.
According to Sara Mednick, “This paper is further evidence of how sleep, specifically naps, can be a tool for memory consolidation. Interestingly, the data shows that not all subjects utilize sleep for consolidation to a similar extent.”
Sara Mednick is an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego’s Laboratory of Sleep and Behavioral Nueroscience.
The paper was published on the journal Sleep’s February 1, 2008 issue.
