Today's 60 Second Psych Podcast is brought to you by my nap-time helper, NyQuil:
Naps Improve Memory of New Tasks
Full transcript after the jump...
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Results tagged “memory” from 60 Second Science
Naps Improve Memory of New Tasks [podcast]
Want a better memory? Take more naps!
Anyone who has ever spent time with a 1-year-old both pre-nap and post-nap knows that a midday doze is good for everyone. In a recent Nature Neuroscience article, a team of Israeli and Canadian researchers provide reason #314159 for why naps are a force for good:
Two groups of participants were each taught a new skill; afterward, the people in one group were sent off for 90 minutes of zzzzz’s. From the Haifa press release:
The group that slept in the afternoon showed a distinct improvement in their task performance by that evening, as opposed to the group that stayed awake, which did not exhibit any improvement. Following an entire night's sleep, both groups exhibited the same skill level. "This part of the research showed that a daytime nap speeds up performance improvement in the brain. After a night's sleep the two groups were at the same level, but the group that slept in the afternoon improved much faster than the group that stayed awake," stressed Prof. Karni.
5-year-old chimp smarter than a dozen college students
Okay, so Ayumu the chimp may not be smarter, but he's a hell of a lot better at quickly processing changing series of numbers and matching them up to random squares on a computer screen.
“There are still many people, including many biologists, who believe that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions,” Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University said in a statement. “No one can imagine that chimpanzees—young chimpanzees at the age of five—have a better performance in a memory task than humans. Here we show for the first time that young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working memory capability for numerical recollection—better than that of human adults tested in the same apparatus, following the same procedure.”
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Sleeping brain processes memories up to 7x faster than waking brain
University of Arizona scientists Bruce McNaughton and David Euston have discovered that the sleeping brain processes memories of real-time events up to 6 or 7 times faster than the waking brain. McNaughton terms the process "thought speed." And now I'm going to go to bed every night while shouting in my best British accent, "Engage!"
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