What Naps Do For Your Brain

TL;DR: the word "brain" in popular-science article titles is almost always clickbait and almost always bullshit.

This article is a great example of something I notice way too often: in so many articles that are supposedly about the brain, if you replace all the brain talk with talk about the mind, virtually nothing about the article changes.

In most of this article, that replacement isn't even necessary since there's very little brain talk, considering the word "brain" is in the title. It's almost all about tests of cognitive performance and visual perception. (Yes, everyone knows cognitive performance depends in some way on your brain — but from the test's point of view it doesn't matter whether you have neurons or jello or a dancing bear inside your head giving you the answers.)

But even the one part that does seem to rely on neuroscience only talks about the time it takes neurons to form connections. I'm sure it's true, but how different would our understanding of napping really be if we had never heard of synapses at all? At least, how different as far as this article is concerned? We'd still be able to talk about a schedule of learning just the same.

I'm not trying to insult academic (i.e., real) neuroscience. I've read several neuroscientists who express similar frustration with this type of publicization of their work.

Edit: I like naps just fine.

Naps are one thing, but the older I get the more I am under the impression that my body very strongly desires to follow a segmented sleep rhythm - I tend to get very sleepy in the late afternoon. Sadly that's a time filled with many activities that often make it impossible for me to "listen" to my body, so to speak, and if I stay awake I don't really get sleepy again until after midnight, which makes a long sleep during the night problematic.

However, when I actually have the opportunity to take a long afternoon nap, I sleep in two separate three-and-a-half to four hour periods. In my experience I feel much better rested when following this sleeping pattern than when trying to sleep in a constant eight hour block.

So, how many of you take naps at work?

[raises hand]

"Civilized societies have siestas." :-)

You have to admire Buffer's PR skills. By writing that seemingly random post about naps and getting it republished, they end up getting a link to their site in the first paragraph of an article on a major blog.

And now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to my nap.

At our office we keep a cot in an office on the 2nd floor. Almost everyone on the dev team has grabbed a nap at some point. I'd rather a 20 minute nap and feel refreshed then trying to keep slogging away drowsy from whatever reason (big lunch, up late the night before whatever). Never had anyone abuse it, max nap was probably 45 minutes someone took with the avg being around 20.

I was never a nap guy. But in testing our biosensing watch I've been amazed that naps reliably reduce my stress and in as little as ten minutes. I'm now up to over 20 naps and they've all had the same effect. I wonder actually if the cognitive benefits might be due more to reduced stress and anxiety. It's something we'll continue to investigate.

I wish that nap time becomes a standard practice everywhere. Just like in Korea.

After lunch and 20 min nap I feel like newborn. And I have the same power for work as in the morning. And in contrast if the lunch was too heavy I may feel groggy the whole afternoon.

So, yes, naps work for me very well.

Tony Schwartz in his book "The Way We're Working Isn't Working" is big on naps. It's basically the crux of the book. In it, he mentions a study on laboratory mice. They were deprived of sleeping or even being unconscious until they died.

From this Tony Schwatz deduces we have a daily nap.

Michel Jouvet[1] was the researcher who developed Modafinil. In one of his experiments, Jouvet deprived cats of sleep until they drowned in a vat of water. On average, the cats survived 35 days with only micro-sleep[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Jouvet [2] http://psychology4a.com/sleep8.htm

If you think naps are effective, give meditation a shot.