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Wanna be lazy and productive at the same time? Try a nap—because napping can improve learning. So said U.C. Berkeley’s Matthew Walker February 21st at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement¹ of Science in San Diego.

He followed two groups of adults who went through rigorous memory exercises. Then one group took a 90-minute snooze. In follow up tests, the nappers performed even better than their first tries. The nonnappers got worse.

This evidence supports the hypothesis that sleep, specifically the first 70-to-90-minute stage of sleep—the length of a common nap—clears out the hippocampus, the area for short-term memory. Says Walker: “Your memories do not remain in the same location, they are actually transferred from one storage site to a different storage site. And the one storage site where they begin is a structure  hippocampus. And the end site where they may go is up into the cortex, this large hard drive reservoir of information.”

After a nap, “Your hippocampal informational inbox of memory email is now cleared out.” Definitely not a tired argument.

—Christie Nicholson