Sleep Your Way To The Top

Working 9 to 5, or something similar? Find yourself sluggish about midday? Maybe you need a few more winks. Just an hour’s nap can make all the difference in your chances for success in your daily endeavors.

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, found that napping an hour can dramatically restore and boost your brain power. Amazingly, they found a nap can actually make you smarter.

Apparently that brain sitting atop your shoulders needs sleep to clear its short-term memory storage so new information may be absorbed.

It’s something akin to when you download too many digital photos to an old PC; it just slows processing to a crawl.

“Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness, but at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap,” says Matthew Walker, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and lead investigator.

Based on the study, college students who pull “all nighters” cramming for finals aren’t doing themselves any big favors. The findings indicate this practice decreases the ability to learn by nearly 40 percent.

In the study, 39 healthy young adults were divided into two groups — nap and no-nap. Both groups were given rigorous learning tasks at noon to stress the hippocampus, a region of the brain that helps store fact-based memories. Results in both groups were similar.

At 2 p.m., the first group napped for 90 minutes while the no-nap group stayed awake. At 6 p.m., both groups were subjected to a new series of learning exercises. Those who napped performed markedly better and actually improved their ability to learn.

“It's as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full and, until you sleep and clear out those fact e-mails, you're not going to receive any more mail. It's just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder,” Walker says.

In addition to boosting your brain power, one study showed that napping can reduce the risk of a fatal heart attack by 37 percent.

From My Notepad

As a young reporter, I once covered an elderly small-city mayor who could go 18 hours in a fast-forward schedule that would have hobbled a man half his age.

I asked him what his secret was to working from very early morning through late night, with few breaks in between.

His simple answer: “Cat naps.”

This mayor would take a half hour nap in the late morning and one in the late afternoon, spacing his downtime in such a way that he could cover administrative functions during the day and public meetings at night.

He always appeared refreshed, sharp, and his energy levels were astounding (btw: this public official lived to be nearly 100).

Some tips for an effective, refreshing afternoon nap:

• Best naptime is 1 p.m. until 3 p.m. when you experience a natural dip in energy.

• Get comfortable. If you have a couch or comfy chair, use them, says Salary.com. Otherwise, stash a yoga mat and pillow behind your desk.

• Draw the shades and wear a sleep mask to stimulate melatonin, a sleep-inducing hormone, advises Body Ecology.

• Your body temperature may fall during sleep, so cover yourself with a light blanket.

• Set an alarm to make sure you don't oversleep.

Walker and his team plan to investigate whether the reduction of sleep experienced by people as they get older is related to the documented decrease in our ability to learn as we age.

Finding that link may be helpful in understanding such neurodegenerative conditions as Alzheimer’s disease, Walker says.

Ken Cocuzzo

Making Numbers Add Up

Math is one of those subjects that people either love or hate. For those people who struggle with math, what if a little electrical jolt (pardon the imagery link with “Frankenstein” in the lab) to the brain could improve your skills?

A new study at the University of Oxford found that applying electrical currents to certain parts of the brain improved a person’s mathematical performance for up to six months.

“We are very excited to see these results”, says Dr. Roi Cohen Kadosh of the University of Oxford and lead author of the study. “We actually aimed to get to this stage in a few years, but we got there sooner than expected.”

Researchers used a technique known as trans-cranial direct current stimulation. This is a non-invasive technique where weak electrical current is applied to the parietal lobe, an area of the brain responsible for numerical understanding, spatial perception, and navigation.

Because the study is relatively small and still in the early stages, some doctors are skeptical over whether practical applications will ever result from the findings. That aside, the results are exciting in the realm of brain research.

Until now, there had not been a treatment targeting numerical ability without having significant side effects to other areas of the brain, such as impaired attention or focus.

“I am certainly not advising people to go around giving themselves electrical shocks, but we are extremely excited about the potential of our findings,’’ Cohen Kadosh says.

“Electrical stimulation will most likely not turn you into Albert Einstein, but if we’re successful, it might be able to help some people to better cope with math.”

Math Skills Matched

Fifteen healthy adults with normal mathematical abilities were involved in the study. Each participant had to learn a series of fake symbols that represented numbers while receiving the noninvasive brain stimulation.

The results, published in the journal Current Biology, showed that the brain stimulation to the parietal lobe improved the participants’ ability to learn the new numbers compared to those who were not stimulated or those who were stimulated in other areas of the brain. The improvements lasted six months after the week-long exercise.

Targeting Learning Disabilities

Cohen Kadosh says the stimulation could help a variety of people with disabilities that stem from the parietal lobe.

About 15 to 20 percent of the population has moderate to severe numerical disabilities, and many other people lose their number processing skills as a result of stoke, dementia or other neurodegenerative diseases.

Dyscalculia is a disability in which people have specific difficulty in learning mathematics. It is associated with dyslexia since many people easily confuse math symbols and numbers.

Dr. Stefani Hines is a developmental and behavioral pediatrician at Beaumont Hospital’s Center for Human Development in Oakland County, Mich. She often sees children with learning disabilities such as dyscalculia.

“I’m working in the trenches and I’ve never heard of this as a treatment for math disabilities,” Hines says. “This might hold some promises at some point in the future if we can figure out what population it will serve and we make sure there are no risky side effects.”

Degenerative Disease Treatment

Brain stimulation also has gained attention as an experimental treatment for degenerative diseases and stroke. Numerous clinical trials have been set up in recent years for patients who suffer from such illnesses.

“There is a lot of work ongoing to find optimal ways to do this stimulation,” said Dr. Bruce Dobkin, professor of Neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

“But there are still a lot of questions, like where exactly to stimulate, what are the parameters, the best frequency, force and amplitude, and how often this treatment should take place.”

Real Life Possibilities

Simply put, Dobkin says everything in the brain is like electrical activity and electrical stimulation bumps up that activity between the neurons.

“The flexibility and adaptability in the brain is pretty miraculous,” Dobkin says. “It’s nothing at all magical, but the real question is: Will this tool be powerful enough for general use, especially in rehab or to enhance learning in developmental disorders?”

Some Healthy Skepticism

With all such groundbreaking discoveries comes doubt or skepticism.

Dr. David Lowenstein, professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Miami School of Medicine, agrees that much more research is required before brain stimulation is used in real life.

Lowenstein says further trials require appropriate control groups to make sure that any observed effects of the stimulation are actual changes and not the placebo effect.

From Our View

WMB believes these studies have merit, but they are in their early stages and further study is needed before wider applications can be considered. Further, larger sampling with more diversity in demographics also is likely required before objective analyses can be applied to these studies.

Unlike other areas of the body, most notably the heart, the brain and its complex functions remain an uncharted frontier with many mysteries which defy easy study or explanation.

Still, it’s exciting to see researchers push the boundaries of our knowledge in an effort to improve the quality of life for those with disabilities while gaining greater understanding of what controls the mind.

This post is by TechMan, WMB co-author who blogs about issues, trends and ideas affecting business, industry, technology and consumers. If you like this post, please share it.