Nobody can appreciate the value of sleep more than a parent, especially when it involves a newborn. Scientific research is continually shedding new light on the importance of getting enough rest, especially in light of how sleep takes a back seat to our increasingly busy lifestyles. In fact, a new study out of U.C. Berkeley has determined that something as simple as an hour of napping time during the day can have a significant impact on our brain’s performance, even making us smarter.

On the flipside, lack of sleep can have negative consequences on our minds, making us slower and compromising our brain’s ability to retain facts and information, sometimes by as much 40%. The reason for this is because sleep has a healing effect on our minds, righting the wrongs that result from sleep deprivation.

Researchers arrived at their findings by observing healthy young adults who were dividing according to whether or not they took naps. During the day, they were subjected to a series of rigorous learning tasks that were specifically designed to challenge the region of the brain responsible for storing fact based information: the hippocampus. Both groups performed comparably well.

When the nap group was allowed a 90 minute sleep break, however, they performed significantly better than the no nap group at a learning exercise administered that evening. In fact, the nap group actually displayed an improved learning capacities than prior to their nap.

The findings support the hypothesis that sleep is an important factor in improving memory and clearing out room for the storage of new information. It also lends some support to the idea of breaking up our sleeping patterns into a “biphasic sleep schedule,” whereby a person simply sleeps twice in a given 24 hour period.

Sleep researchers have established that much of our fact based memory is stored, at least temporarily, in the hippocampus before it is shuttled off to the prefrontal cortex, which there is believed to be more storage capacity. In fact, the authors of the study used a computer analogy on the subject of our memories, calling our hippocampus an “email inbox” that will not receive any more messages when it is full.

This clearing out of old messages occurs through sleep. Not just any sleep, however, but specific periods of sleep from which we derive the most memory enhancing benefits, also known as stage 2 non-REM sleep. This is the stage of rest that happens between deep sleep (non-REM sleep) and dream sleep, or REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Previously, it was not clear what the purpose of stage 2 non-REM sleep was, even though it accounts for at least half of our sleeping hours.

The new findings offer insight into why this may be so, and opens up future directions of research, including the search for a better understanding of whether or not our decreased ability to learn as we get older is related in any way to the reduction in sleep that occurs as we age.