Naps and Memory
Thursday, May 1, 2008

Preparing for a big presentation or are your children cramming for exams? Then you might want to make time for a nap, according to a study by New York researchers. Dr. Ken Davis tells us more in today’s 60 Second Housecall.

A study of New York undergraduates found that naps may help a person’s memory.

The 33 college students took three different tests of their short-term memory. The researchers’ findings were reported in the February edition of Sleep.

 In one test, they had to learn and remember pairs of unrelated words. In another test, they had to navigate and remember a maze shown on a computer screen. In the last test, the students copied a complex drawing onto a sheet of paper, and then sketched the drawing from memory.

After the testing, half of the students napped for about 45 minutes, while other students watched television. The students then repeated the three memory tests.

Results showed that napping improved scores on the word-pair test, but not the other two tests. On all three tests, people with the highest scores before napping were the ones with the biggest gains in their post-nap test scores.

For North Mississippi Medical Center, I’m Dr. Ken Davis.