Everything about sleep
- Thread starter Hrothbern
- Start date
from: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/22/naps.memory.dream.brain/index.html
"(Health.com) -- Sleep has long been known to improve performance on memory tests. Now, a new study suggests that an afternoon power nap may boost your ability to process and store information tenfold -- but only if you dream while you're asleep".
"In the study, Stickgold and his colleagues asked 99 college students to memorize a complex maze on a computer. The researchers then placed the students inside a virtual, 3-D version of the maze and asked them to navigate to another spot within it. After doing this several times, half of the participants took a 90-minute nap while the other half stayed awake and watched videos".
"When the students were given the maze test again five hours later, the nappers did better than the students who had stayed awake, even those who had reviewed the maze in their heads. However, the nappers who dreamed about the maze -- one described being lost in a bat cave -- performed 10 times better than the nappers who didn't".
FYI
A normal night sleep:
you go several times through a on average 1.5 hour cycle, having mainly light sleep, 15-20% deep sleep and 15-20% REM (dream) sleep, in that order.
In the first cycles typical more deep sleep, and in the last cycles typical more REM (dream) sleap.
But during a nap you can immediately get into REM (dream) sleap
(I can confirm that from personal experience)
I guess: If you would be able (to learn) to control that, power naps of say 20 minutes would be a perfect tool to "digest" a lot of recent info, and better than the traditional way of making a summary only, right after the info.
"(Health.com) -- Sleep has long been known to improve performance on memory tests. Now, a new study suggests that an afternoon power nap may boost your ability to process and store information tenfold -- but only if you dream while you're asleep".
"In the study, Stickgold and his colleagues asked 99 college students to memorize a complex maze on a computer. The researchers then placed the students inside a virtual, 3-D version of the maze and asked them to navigate to another spot within it. After doing this several times, half of the participants took a 90-minute nap while the other half stayed awake and watched videos".
"When the students were given the maze test again five hours later, the nappers did better than the students who had stayed awake, even those who had reviewed the maze in their heads. However, the nappers who dreamed about the maze -- one described being lost in a bat cave -- performed 10 times better than the nappers who didn't".
FYI
A normal night sleep:
you go several times through a on average 1.5 hour cycle, having mainly light sleep, 15-20% deep sleep and 15-20% REM (dream) sleep, in that order.
In the first cycles typical more deep sleep, and in the last cycles typical more REM (dream) sleap.
But during a nap you can immediately get into REM (dream) sleap
(I can confirm that from personal experience)
I guess: If you would be able (to learn) to control that, power naps of say 20 minutes would be a perfect tool to "digest" a lot of recent info, and better than the traditional way of making a summary only, right after the info.
I suppose (going by the maze-related, but not identical to the maze, dream) that it is an issue of memory working through a large number of parallels (on that level). In this way (subconsciously) one can have a background of many more types of storing the same info, which in turn would allow for most aspects of it becoming more easily available.
yes
I guess it is most beneficial when the info to be digested is not of the serial logic type, but of the multi related type, multi branching type, where the more paralel processing capacity of our subconsciousness gets more room to digest durin REM dreaming.
