SSS 2010-02-24（在线收听）

Wanna be lazy and productive at the same time? Try a nap—because napping can improve learning. So said U.C. Berkeley’s Matthew Walker February 21st at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego.

He followed two groups of adults who went through rigorous memory exercises. Then one group took a 90-minute snooze. In follow up tests, the nappers performed even better than their first tries. The nonnappers got worse.

This evidence supports the hypothesis that sleep, specifically the first 70-to-90-minute stage of sleep—the length of a common nap—clears out the hippocampus, the area for short-term memory. Says Walker: “Your memories do not remain in the same location, they are actually transferred from one storage site to a different storage site. And the one storage site where they begin is a structure  hippocampus. And the end site where they may go is up into the cortex, this large hard drive reservoir of information.”

After a nap, “Your hippocampal informational inbox of memory email is now cleared out.” Definitely not a tired argument.

—Christie Nicholson