MONDAY, Feb. 22 (HealthDay News) -- A midday nap may significantly improve the brain's learning capacity, a process that may be associated with stage 2 non-REM sleep, according to research presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held from Feb. 18 to 22 in San Diego.
Matthew Walker, Ph.D., of the University of California at Berkeley, and colleagues assessed hippocampal-dependent associative learning capacity in 39 healthy young adults (mean age, 20.7 years) at noon, then randomly assigned participants to either take a 100-minute polysomnogram-monitored nap at 2 p.m. or stay awake. Both groups were again assessed at 6 p.m.
The researchers found that the nap blocked the significant deterioration of hippocampal-dependent associative learning capacity which was observed in the group that stayed awake. They also found that the restoration of associative hippocampal-dependent learning in the nap group was only associated with stage 2 non-REM sleep, specifically the number of fast sleep spindles over left and right prefrontal regions.
"Such evidence supports a model of sleep-dependent hippocampal-neocortical memory transfer, which, as a consequence, reinstates efficient next-day learning ability," the authors conclude.
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