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Nap time: Does sleeping in the afternoon refresh you?

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Taking a mid-afternoon nap may prepare the brain to learn new things, early research suggests.

U.S. researchers studied 39 young adults who were divided into two groups. At noon, study participants took a memory test that required them to remember faces linked to names.

Of those in the study, 20 took a nap for 100 minutes. All of the volunteers were then retested at 6 p.m.

Those who stayed awake did about 10 per cent worse on the tests compared with those who napped, said Matthew Walker of University of California at Berkeley. He presented the preliminary findings Sunday at the American Association of the Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego.

The more hours we spend awake, the more sluggish the brain becomes, the study suggests.

Read more:

If you are a napper, how does it affect you? Are you more awake and alert or more sluggish and tired after your nap? Take our poll.

(This poll is not scientific. It is based on readers' votes.)

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