One more reason to hit the snooze button

Could sleeping that extra lunch away be beneficial to your work and learning? If the recent results from a University of California are anything to go by, you just might be taking a nap every afternoon.

In the research, 39 young adults were divided into two groups and at noon, all the participants took a memory exercise that required them to remember faces and link them with names. The participants took another memory exercise again at 6 p.m., but 20 participants had napped for 100 minutes during the break.

As a result, those who did not nap fared about 10% worse on tests than those who napped. While the findings are still preliminary, this research indicates that a lengthy afternoon nap can help prepare the brain to remember things.

"Sleep is not just for the body. It's very much for the brain," says study author Matthew Walker, an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Walker adds that this research is also evidence that it's not just important to sleep after learning, but a person needs it before learning to prepare the brain for absorbing new information.