Take a nap to boost productivity at work

Study suggests a quick kip in the office can help with memory and learning.

Memory recall study

A study from Germany has found that a nap of about an hour can significantly improve memory performance.

The research published in Neurology of Learning and Memory involved 41 participants and examined their memory recall.

After learning single words and word pairs, about half of the participants had a sleep and the others watched a DVD. All participants were then re-tested and the napping group demonstrated that they had retained substantially more word pairs in memory than the group that had watched a DVD.

Study co-author and supervisor Professor Axel Mecklinger says the results are clear: “Even a short sleep lasting 45 to 60 minutes produces a five-fold improvement in information retrieval form memory.”

“A short nap at the office or in school is enough to significantly improve learning success. Wherever people are in a learning environment, we should think seriously about the positive effects of sleep,” says Mecklinger.

The hippocampus & memory

The researchers were particularly focused on the role of the hippocampus- a region of the brain where memories are ‘consolidated’- previously learned information is transferred to long-term memory storage.

Check out the video below where Brains Explained illustrates what the hippocampus is and how it functions and its role in memory.