2023-05-03 20:02:29
health
Naps can have a positive effect on the brain’s ability to memorize and learn.
3/5/2023
One of the lines of research that scientists dedicated to studying sleep have explored has to do with naps, which, although they are not as long, frequent and necessary as sleeping at night, have multiple positive effects. on the cognitive and physical health of individuals.
In fact, research published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Neuroscience he dedicated himself to exploring the effects that different sleep sessions had on a group of people who had to complete certain specific tasks.
Specifically, the authors of the scientific study asked the participants to perform some visual texture discrimination tasks for several days.
They were not given any additional training to perform the exercises, so their brains had to rely on what the researchers identified as “slow learning.” They noted that this process for learning certain tasks generally requires night sleep.
“Here, we tested human subjects four times in one day and found that with repeated testing within the day, perception thresholds actually increased progressively throughout the four testing sessions,” the researchers explained. In other words, the people who participated in the study had worse results on their tests as the day progressed, so the scores in the fourth test session were the worst.
However, the researchers indicated that the performance decline was mitigated by changing some of the stimuli the participants were subjected to and allowing them to nap between the second and third sessions, which was at lunchtime.
“Naps had the same magnitude of benefit as full nights sleep if they had a specific nap quality,” said researcher Sara Mednick, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, who was quoted in a journal article The New York Times.
The scientist also pointed out that a nap that lasts between 20 and 60 minutes could be useful for people to improve their ability to memorize and learn certain information.
Can naps increase the risk of obesity?
Scientific evidence in recent years has shown that individuals who take a daytime nap may perform better on cognitive tests that ask about using memory or the ability to learn. However, they could also have some unwanted health effects.
Another study, which was published in the scientific journal Obesity, showed that certain types of naps can increase the risk of suffering from some conditions. The research was carried out in a population from the Mediterranean area, because they culturally include naps in their daily habits.
In total, they analyzed the behavior of 3,275 adults between the ages of 18 and 65. As a result, they found that people who took long-term naps (longer than 30 minutes) had higher values of several indicators associated with obesity, such as higher values of body mass index (BMI, which measures how much a person weighs). person compared to their height), waist circumference, blood sugar levels before breakfast, blood pressure, and higher prevalence of metabolic syndrome.
“The results require (larger) studies to investigate whether short naps are recommended over long naps., especially in individuals with behaviors that mediate the association between long naps and obesity, such as delayed meals and sleep times, or in those who smoke. In addition, studies are needed to assess whether a lower caloric intake at lunch decreases the deleterious effects of prolonged naps on obesity and systolic blood pressure,” the researchers concluded.
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