Hush Little Babies, Sleep at Your Desks (or Office Couches)
Ever feel like you’re not absorbing as much as you should, particularly later in the day? It’s not your imagination, according to new research coming out of the University of California, Berkeley. According to the school’s findings, naps allow the brain to shift new information into its longer-term storage compartment, the prefrontal cortex, making room for even newer data in the hippocampus, where memories are first logged. The conclusions were drawn during a recent study of 39 young adults, who were evenly split into “nap” and “no nap” camps, then given some difficult learning tasks at noon. The 18 adults who fell into the “nap” group then took a 90-minute-long nap beginning at 2 p.m., while the rest were left to putter
22 February 2010•1 min read
