Naps Clear Brain's Inbox, Improve Learning
During sleep, memories locked in the brain's short-term storage migrates into a longer-term database, according to a new study that backs up the benefits of midday power naps.
Although the "dreaming" sleep stage known as REM is perhaps better known, humans actually spend about half of the night in stage 2 non-REM.
REM sleep is crucial for more complex thinking, such as making nonobvious connections between previously learned facts—a process he describes as "a Google search gone wrong—or right."
"When you have a problem, no one says you should 'stay awake on it,'" he quipped.
Instead, sleep—specifically the REM stage—is a way for the brain to take information that might at first seem unrelated to your mental "search" and come up with creative solutions.
In fact, he said, our dreams could be a testing ground for this subconcious problem-solving.
Not Everyone Built for Naps
Unfortunately, the new findings don't mean that all people
