A new study shows that a short nap lasting about an hour can significantly improve memory performance.  The findings released by the Researchers at Saarland University was conducted on 41 volunteers.  The volunteers had to learn single words and word pairs. Once the learning phase was over, the participants were tested to determine how much information they could remember. About half of the participants were then allowed to sleep, while the others watched a DVD. After that, the participants were re-tested and those who had taken a nap were shown to have retained substantially more word pairs in memory than the participants in the control group who had watched a DVD. The results of the study have been published in the respected academic journal “Neurobiology of Learning and Memory”. In addition to revealing that those who enjoyed a little snooze performed five times as well as those who hadn’t, the results showed that the volunteers’ post-nap memory was just as good as it had been before the nap. Then, the researchers examined brain activity to determine how naps seemed to improve memory. The hippocampus — a brain region known to play a role in memory consolidation — transfers learned information into memory storage after the information is learned. Electroencephalogram (EEG) tests revealed that the brain’s activity during sleep seems to supercharge the hippocampus’s ability to consolidate information.  The researchers still don’t know, however, why some memories are strengthened during a short nap while others aren’t. The publication can be accessed via: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1074742715000362