To reach this conclusion, Matthew Walker and his team conducted an experiment with 39 healthy young adults who were divided into two groups: those who napped and those who did not. At noon, all of them completed a learning task aimed attest the hippocampus, a region of the brain linked to memory. Two hours later, half of them took a 90-minute nap. When asked to do a new round of learning exercises at 6 p.m., the results showed thatthose who had stayed awake all day learned more slowly. On the contrary, those who had enjoyed a nap performed better, and many had even improved their ability to learn in the face of the morning test.
The findings support the hypothesis thatsleep is necessary to clear short-term memory and “make room” for new informationWalker explained Sunday during the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in San Diego (USA). “It is as if the inbox of our hippocampus was full and until we sleep and clean all those emails we could not receive any more emails,” adds the researcher, and explains that when we sleep “we pass the emails” to another “folder”, the prefrontal cortex, with much more capacity.
On the other hand,the more hours we spend awake, the slower our brain becomes. Also, passa sleepless night reduces the ability to undertake new activities by almost 40 percentdue to the paralysis of some areas of the brain. Now Walker and his team want to study whether the reduction in sleep hours that often accompany aging is linked tomemory loss and neurodegenerative diseases, which could provide new clues to combat, for example, Alzheimer’s.
