Dana Press: Brain in the News, June 2003, Vol 10 No. 6 Study Shows You Don’t Lose When you Snooze, by Jay Ingram, taken from the Toronto Star, June 22, 2003, p. A14. Researchers from Harvard have discovered that naps, even short ones as long as they contain some REM sleep, help consolidate the memory of visual tasks. The work has been reported in journal NATURE NEUROSCIENCE.

The researchers tested two groups of subjects early in the morning on identical visual tasks. One group had an afternoon nap, the other did not. All were retested in the evening. Non -nappers slipped in performance, becoming slower than they had in morning testing. But all in the “nap” group showed some improvement in the evening testing. Even when the nap was as short as an hour, individual performance improved significantly. It was not just maintenance of performance levels, but improvement over morning testing results.

REM sleep, during which almost all dreams occur, appears to play a role in the laying of new memory. While other stages of sleep involve diminished brain activity, REM sleep does not. There are 4-5 periods of REM sleep spaced out over the night, averaging 15 minutes of so in length, when eyes dart laterally, muscles are paralyzed and the brain is incredibly active. Most vivid dreams occur then. But it also appears that the day’s learning experience is reinforced.

The Learning Brain, Vol. 5 No.6 June 2003, White Noise Impacts Hearing and Language Skills, by Jennifer Decker Arevalo, M.A. SCIENCE magazine reports that exposure to ongoing environmental white noise, such as a refrigerator motor, might negatively impact the hearing and language acquisition of babies.

In work done at UCSF, Merzenich and Chang found in 2003 that rats raised in ongoing noise took 3-4 times longer to achieve complete auditory development than young rat pups raised without a noisy environment.