Sleeping a little in the afternoon has a restorative effect and significantly improves the brain’s ability to form new connections. “An afternoon nap can sustain performance in highly demanding situations.”
The brain can recover and improve its learning capacity through a brief nap, not just longer nighttime sleep, research concludes Thursday in the journal NeuroImage.
Until a nap is enough to reorganize connections between nerve cells, allowing new information to be stored more effectivelyaccording to the study carried out by experts from the University Medical Center of Freiburg (Germany), the University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG) and the University of Geneva (UNIGE).
“Even short periods of sleep increase the brain’s ability to encode new information,” he stressed. Christoph Nissendirector of the study, currently head of the Sleep Medicine Center at Geneva Hospitals and professor of Psychiatry at UNIGE, in a HUG press release.
The brain is constantly active throughout the day, processing new impressions, thoughts and information. This strengthens the connections between nerve cells (synapses) that are critical for learning, but can lead to saturation, reducing the brain’s ability to continue learning.
Sleep helps regulate this excessive activity without losing important information, and now a new study shows that this “synaptic reset” it can occur with just an afternoon nap, “freeing up space for new memories to form,” Nissen noted.
The study looked at 20 young adults who, on two different afternoons, took a 45-minute nap or stayed awake. Their brain activity was analyzed using non-invasive methods, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation and electroencephalograms.
The results showed that, after the nap, the overall strength of synaptic connections in the brain has decreasedan indication of the restorative effect of sleep, while, at the same time, the The brain’s ability to form new connections has improved significantly.
The study offers a biological explanation for why people generally perform better after an afternoon nap, especially in professions or activities that require a high level of mental or physical performance, such as music, sports or safety-critical roles.
“An afternoon nap can sustain performance in highly demanding situations”, summarized the director of the study.
This also points to this conclusion.
So, if you think that “naps are disgusting”, only “for pets and babies” and that “sleeping should be done at night” as this interviewee on the New York subway thinks, you are wrong.
