CAN A SHORT SLEEP HELP YOU LEARN?
"Twenty minutes on my bed and I feel like a new person," says Noa Levin, a tenth-grader. When she gets home from school, Noa sleeps for a short while before she opens her books. A nap makes her feel awake again, she explains, so she can finish her homework faster. Her parents are worried. They believe that she will lie awake at night, and that she will lose time she needs for homework.(lines 1–8)
To discover whether sleeping in the afternoon really helps students learn, a team at Northbridge University ran two studies last spring. The first study, with a group of high-school students, took place right after the school day. Half of them went to a quiet room and slept for an hour and a half, while the others stayed awake and played board games. Next, everyone studied a map of an imaginary town for ten minutes and then tried to draw it from memory. The students who had stayed awake drew far more streets and buildings correctly than the sleepers.(lines 9–15)
In the second study, a few weeks later, the sleepers were woken up after just twenty minutes. Everything else stayed the same. Now the sleepers drew the better maps. Dr. Ruth Hale, who led the team, explains: "A nap helps us learn when it is short. The brain rests and stores what it has just seen. After a long nap, we come out of deep sleep and feel slow for a while." One question is still open, she adds: "We don't know yet whether naps help teenagers who already sleep enough at night."(lines 16–21)
The researchers also compared naps taken at different times of day, and timing turned out to matter as well. The students did best after naps that ended before four o'clock in the afternoon. Later naps often made it hard for them to fall asleep at night, exactly what Noa's parents were afraid of.(lines 22–25)