Article by the Drummond Education Team 
Have you ever had a problem you couldn’t solve, then put it aside until the next day? If so, did you know the solution as soon as you woke up? This is no coincidence. There’s plenty of evidence that sleep benefits all sorts of learning – and, as a recent Harvard University study demonstrated, a 60 to 90-minute nap can do the job just as effectively as sleeping all night!
Other recent studies that analysed declarative memory (that’s the ability to recall facts), found that students who had a quick nap after learning vocabulary remembered the words better.
A good night’s sleep is crucial to storing knowledge learned earlier in the day — that much was known. Now, a new study finds that getting shut-eye before you learn is important, too.
Volunteers who took a 100-minute nap before launching into an evening memorisation task scored an average of 20 percentage points higher on the memory test compared with people who did the memorization without snoozing first.
“It really seems to be the first evidence that we’re aware of that indicates a proactive benefit of sleep,” study co-author Matthew Walker, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, told LiveScience.
“It’s not simply enough to sleep after learning,” Walker said. “It turns out you also need to sleep before learning.”
Refreshing naps
Earlier research has found that dreams boost learning, with one study suggesting a 90-minute nap may help lock in long-term memories. But Walker’s research, published this week in the journal Current Biology, finds that another phase of sleep, called nonrapid eye movement (NREM) is most closely linked to the learning boost provided by a nap.
Walker and his colleagues recruited 44 volunteers — 27 women and 17 men — to come to the sleep lab at noon. First, the volunteers were given a task in which they had to memorize 100 names and faces. Then they were tested for how well they recalled the face-name matches.
Next, the researchers tucked half of the volunteers in for a nap between 2 p.m. and 3:40 p.m. The scientists measured the napping volunteers’ brain waves as they slept. The other group of participants stayed awake and did daily activities as they normally would. At 6 p.m., both groups memorized another set of 100 faces and names and were tested on their memory. (The experiment was set up so nappers had more than an hour to shake off any remaining fuzziness before the test, Walker said.)
Sweet dreams!
Source: Telegraph.co.uk & Live Science.com