How
Napping Changes Your Brain That Makes You More Creative
Do you
find that by the afternoon you are getting weary and losing focus? You may even
find yourself starting to nod off. Chances are you need a good afternoon nap.
Napping
has been shown to aid in hormonal maintenance, cell repair and even promote
better heart function. Napping can also help you live longer, look younger and
keep more fit and active. By taking a nap you recharge your brain which leads
to greater alertness, improved memory retention and creative insight.
Professor
Jim Home from Loughborough University says that human
beings are actually designed to have two sleeps a day; one in the early
afternoon and a long one at night.
An article
in The New York Times notes that napping is a common occurrence in many
countries around the world:
The idea
that we should sleep in eight-hour chunks is relatively recent. The world’s
population sleeps in various and surprising ways. Millions of Chinese workers
continue to put their heads on their desks for a nap of an hour or so after
lunch, for example, and daytime napping is common from India to Spain.
“Emerging
scientific evidence suggests that naps — even very short ones — significantly
enhance cognitive function,” Jonathan Friedman, M.D., director of the Texas
Brain and Spine Institute, in Bryan says. “Increasing understanding of how
sleep improves brain function may someday allow us to harness this effect, and
the current study may open one of many doors in this regard.”
Napping
enhances brain power
Napping
helps to clear out the brain’s temporary storage space so that the brain is
ready to receive and retain new information, according to researchers in the
US. This research was led by Dr Matthew Walker, an assistant professor of
psychology at the University of California.
The
researchers propose that a nap that lasts around an hour can refresh the mind
and restore brain power and may even make you smarter.
Walker stated:
Walker stated:
“Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness
but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you
took a nap.”
The study
39 healthy
young adults participated in the study. The participants were divided into two
groups: a nap group and a no-nap group. Both groups were given a task that
required them to retain a lot of information and facts. This task was taken at
midday. At 2 pm the nap group participants went to sleep for about 1.5 hours.
The no-nap participants remained awake. A new lot of learning activities were
undertaken by both groups at 6 pm.
The
results
The group
that took an afternoon nap achieved better results in
the 6pm exercise then the group who were forced to stay awake the entire day.
Once more the nap group performed even better in the 6pm exercise then they had
in the 12 pm task.
Thus, it
was proposed by Walker that the process of napping cleared the brain’s short
term memory storage so that the nap taking participants could retain more new information.
The
hippocampus
Studies
have shown that the hippocampus temporarily stores fact-based memories. The
hippocampus then transfers these memories to the brain’s prefrontal cortex.
Walker says the hippocampus functions much like
an email inbox, when it gets full you need to sleep in order to clear it out.
If you don’t sleep the email box will be full up and won’t be able to receive
any more emails or information.
“It’s just going to bounce until you sleep and move it
into another folder,” said Walker.
Napping
and creativity
Recent
research, presented at an annual meeting of neuroscientists, showed that during
rest the right side of the brain was stimulated while the left hemisphere
remained relatively quiet. To achieve this findings researchers monitored the
brain activity of 15 at-rest individuals. The right side of the brain is the
area of the brain associated with creativity.
The
studies’ author Andrei Medvedev, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Georgetown
University’s Center for Functional and Molecular Imaging says: “The right side
of the brain was better integrated”.
It is
generally thought that the right hemisphere is associated with creative tasks,
such as visualization and thinking about the broader picture. The
left side is believed to be more analytic and focused on numbers and language.
Medvedev
proposes that the right brain is “cleaning up” and consolidating memories when
one takes a nap.
Summation
We have
seen how napping positively effects the brain in various ways. Not only does it
boost brain power but it also stimulates the right side of the brain which is
thought to “clean up” our brains and consolidate memories. So next time you
find yourself loosing focus or becoming less productive as the day progresses
it may be worth your while to take a short nap.
BY REBECCA
BERIS
http://www.lifehack.org/409580/how-napping-changes-your-brain-that-makes-you-more-creative?ref=mail&mtype=daily_newsletter&mid=20160629_customized&uid=687414&email=drmsriram%40yahoo.com&action=click
No comments:
Post a Comment