Naps Improve Memory

IF you nap, you can wake up with a sharper memory. That's what happened in a recent study on nap involving 33 students.

First, students perform three tests of their short-term memory. In one test, they must learn and remember pairs of words that are not related, such as the 'alligator' and 'cigar'. In another test, they must be down and given a place of winding displayed on a computer screen. And at the last test, students had to copy a complex drawing onto a sheet of paper, and then draw from memory.

Then, half of the students napped for 45 minutes, while other students watched TV. Finally, all students repeated the three memory tests. Naps improve the value of the test word pairs, but not the other two tests.

Research conducted by Matthew Tucker, PhD, and William Fishbein, PhD, who works in the psychology department of the City College of the City University of New York shows the value that in all tests, the person with the highest score on the test before going to bed is a person who has the highest score on the test after sleep. Therefore, if they do not really absorb the information before going to sleep, then a nap is not going to magically make the information was absorbed.