The Holidays are getting closer and you have no gift ideas? Maybe a little nap will help you recall the gift preferences of your loved ones! You might have known that sleep helps you boost your memory, but would you ever have thought that a sharp memory could also help you boost your creativity too?
According to to researcher Sara C. Mednick, PhD from the University of California in San Diego, the REM (rapid eye movement) sleep stage could play a role in people’s memory capacity. REM sleep is also called paradoxical sleep and represents 20 to 25% of an adult’s total sleep, which equates to 90 to 120 minutes in a night. During REM sleep the brain’s neurons are as active as during our waking hours and our dreams are most vivid during this phase of sleep.
The researchers gave study participants a creativity task during which they were shown several groups of three words and then had to find a fourth word which could be associated with the first three. Participants were tested in the morning and in the afternoon. They were divided into two groups: One that took a nap with REM sleep after the first test, and the other without REM sleep or with a quiet rest.
While the latter group showed no improvement on the test, the REM sleep group had improved by almost 40 percent, compared to their morning performances.
It seems that the REM sleep stage serves to combine all the information we process on a daily basis to then turn it into future useful memories.
According to , our memories could even help us imagine our future: Following a recent brain imaging study, Schacter and his colleagues found that our capacity to remember the past could play a major role in our ability to imagine future events. The results of the study showed that certain brain regions commonly associated with memory, such as the medial temporal lobe, were similarly activated when people imagined future experiences.