Saturday, April 19, 2008

Quick Shut-eye on the Job Improves Performance



Work life balance is very important because this will ensure one having sufficient rest and able to deliver quality jobs.

Very often we noticed employees work more than 60 hours per week. Without sufficient rest, they make more mistakes, and more time has been taken to resolve the mistakes or damages done.

The article below explained the research finding on how rest can improve human memory and mental performance.

Dr, Olaf Lahl at the University of Dusseldorf, Germany, has shown that simply falling asleep does more than refresh the brain- it can improve recall and metal efficiency.

In fact, a 6 minute nap can have the same effect as nighttime sleep on memory.

Lahl’s team asked students to memorise a list of vocabulary and tested their ability to recall the list after an hour of playing solitaire.

Volunteers were asked to remember a list of 30 words. They were then given an hour break before the memory test. During the break, some volunteers were allowed to nap for 6 minutes, while others had to stay awake.

The researchers found that those who had been allowed to nap displayed ‘superior recall’ in the memory test compared to those who stayed awake.

The researchers said this was the first time that a very brief sleep has been shown to improve memory. “To our knowledge, this demonstrates for the first time that an ultra-brief sleep episode provides an effective memory enhancement,” Lahl writes in the Journal of Sleep Research.

His researchers found that it was possible that falling asleep triggered a process in the brain that continued regardless of how long the person stayed asleep.

“It seems much more is happening during the initialization of sleep than we once thought,” Lahl says. “Maybe much of sleep’s functional aspects are accomplished at its very beginning.” –dpa.

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