Napping Works

"Power Nap" Prevents Burnout; Morning Sleep Perfects a Skill

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Evidence is mounting that sleep — even a nap — appears to enhance information processing and learning. New experiments by NIMH grantee Alan Hobson, M.D., Robert Stickgold, Ph.D., and colleagues at Harvard University show that a midday snooze reverses information overload and that a 20 percent overnight improvement in learning a motor skill is largely traceable to a late stage of sleep that some early risers might be missing. Overall, their studies suggest that the brain uses a night's sleep to consolidate the memories of habits, actions and skills learned during the day.

The bottom line: we should stop feeling guilty about taking that "power nap" at work or catching those extra winks the night before our piano recital.

Reporting in the July, 2002 Nature Neuroscience, Sara Mednick, Ph.D., Stickgold and colleagues demonstrate that "burnout" — irritation, frustration and poorer performance on a mental task — sets in as a day of training wears on. Subjects performed a visual task, reporting the horizontal or vertical orientation of three diagonal bars against a background of horizontal bars in the lower left corner of a computer screen. Their scores on the task worsened over the course of four daily practice sessions. Allowing subjects a 30-minute nap after the second session prevented any further deterioration, while a 1-hour nap actually boosted performance in the third and fourth sessions back to morning levels.

Rather than generalized fatigue, the researchers suspected that the burnout was limited to just the brain visual system circuits involved in the task. To find out, they engaged a fresh set of neural circuitry by switching the location of the task to the lower right corner of the computer screen for just the fourth practice session. As predicted, subjects experienced no burnout and performed about as well as they did in the first session — or after a short nap.

This led the researchers to propose that neural networks in the visual cortex "gradually become saturated with information through repeated testing, preventing further perceptual processing." They think burnout may be the brain's "mechanism for preserving information that has been processed but has not yet been consolidated into memory by sleep."

So how might a nap help? Recordings of brain and ocular electrical activity monitored while napping revealed that the longer 1-hour naps contained more than four times as much deep, or slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep than the half-hour naps. Subjects who took the longer naps also spent significantly more time in a slow wave sleep state on the test day than on a "baseline" day, when they were not practicing. Previous studies by the Harvard group have traced overnight memory consolidation and improvement on the same perceptual task to amounts of slow wave sleep in the first quarter of the night and to REM sleep in the last quarter. Since a nap hardly allows enough time for the latter early morning REM sleep effect to develop, a slow wave sleep (SWS) effect appears to be the antidote to burnout.