Naps with stages spark learning.Napping shows potential as a way to stimulate learning, at least for volunteers performing a laboratory task that requires visual discriminations. There's a catch, though, say psychologist Sara Mednick Sara C. Mednick is a sleep researcher at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies. Her research is strongly focused on the relationship between napping and performance. She is the author of several papers and a mass market title on the subject, Take a Nap! Change Your Life. of Harvard University Harvard University, mainly at Cambridge, Mass., including Harvard College, the oldest American college. Harvard College Harvard College, originally for men, was founded in 1636 with a grant from the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. and her colleagues. Only naps consisting of both slow-wave sleep Slow-wave sleep (SWS) is made up of the two deepest stages of non-rapid eye movement sleep. SWS is often referred to as deep sleep. The highest arousal thresholds (e.g. and rapid-eye movement (REM (REMarks) A programming language statement used for documentation. Rem statements are not executed by the compiler. They are created for people to read. Rem is also used in DOS batch files for comments as well as for disabling instructions. ) sleep inspire improved performance on the task. In fact, the volunteers' speed in accurately doing the task increased as much after taking a 90-minute nap that contained both sleep stages as had previously been observed for people granted a full night's slumber (SN: 7/22/00,p.55). The findings appear in the July Nature Neuroscience Nature Neuroscience is a scientific journal published by Nature Publishing Group, the publisher of Nature. Its focus is original research papers relating specifically to neuroscience. . In the study, 73 volunteer participants spent 1 hour in the morning learning to identify the orientation of three bars flashed in the lower left quarter of a computer screen against a background of horizontal bars horizontal bar Event in men's gymnastics competition in which a steel bar fixed about 8 ft (2.4 m) above the floor is used for swinging exercises. Competitors generally wear hand protectors and perform routines that last 15–30 seconds. . In the afternoon, 26 of the volunteers took a 60-minute nap and another 19 snoozed for 90 minutes. The rest went without a nap. When tested that evening, the 30 nappers who had displayed both sleep stages--as determined by brain wave measurements--required less time to make the same visual discriminations that they had made in the morning. The other nappers took slightly longer to execute the task than they had before. Performance plummeted among those who hadn't napped. Two-stage nappers maintained their superiority on the task when tested the next morning, after all participants had had a night's sleep.--B.B. |
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