Here’s an article close to my heart: Naps Not Just for Kids: They Help Adults Get Creative, Boost Memory. Here’s some points from the article:
- Interrupting sleep seriously disrupts memory-making.
- Taking a nap may boost a sophisticated kind of memory that helps us see the big picture and get creative.
- Particularly important is “slow-wave sleep,” a period of deep sleep that occurs before REM sleep, which can occur even in a power nap.
- Even a 12-minute nap can boost some forms of memory.
Having worked from home the past three years, I’ll often take a power nap around 3 pm, which helps me finish the day stronger than if I didn’t. Sometimes I’ll fall into a deep sleep and maybe wake up a 1/2-hour or so later, but typically I’ll rest for only about 15-minutes, which works great for me. Working from offices before that, though, even ones with couches available, I can’t say I’d feel comfortable stretching out in front of everyone (no one else did).
On a more enlightened note, Google employees are encouraged to take naps. Check this out.
Winston Churchill was big on naps. He’d work late into the evening and needed afternoon naps to keep himself fresh and productive.
Thomas Edison was also famous for his naps. He was known to work and nap around the clock, even sleeping right on his workbench.
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12:11 pm on February 28th, 2009 1
Here’s a related article I read this week in Inc magazine: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090301/innovation-the-hydras-robot.html.
This article is about a snake-like robot that can roll up a pole for doing things such as inspecting oil and gas pipelines or the underside of a bridge. The robot’s designer, Dennis Hong, says the idea for the robot came to him in a dream.
In the episode about notebooks, http://explodingcreativity.com/2008/07/notebooks, I mentioned one use for a notebook is as a dream log. The hard part of mining your dreams for ideas is remembering the dreams. Writing them down helps us remember them and then to associate the dreams with new ideas or whatever we’re working on at the time.
8:39 pm on June 10th, 2009 2
WSJ article on the importance of sleep: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124451280076496767.html.
10:11 am on June 18th, 2009 3
Here’s some more news about the importance of sleep: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8090730.stm. One thing noted there:
“[A] study at the University of California San Diego showed that the volunteers who entered REM during sleep improved their creative problem solving ability by almost 40%.”
6:47 pm on March 2nd, 2011 4
Here’s an article in the February 2010 issue of The Economist, http://www.economist.com/node/15573431?story_id=15573431, with the by-line, “Researchers say an afternoon nap prepares the brain to learn”.
A researcher at UC Berkeley says that the ability to form memories relating to specific events, places, and times (episodic memory, or fact-based memories, as opposed to procedural memory) deteriorates with accrued wakefulness, and that sleeping helps move short-term memories into long-term memory, thus allowing more information to go into short term memory later (which can then go into long-term memory), and thus facilitates learning.