NEED to remember something? Take a break. It seems that resting in a quiet room for 10 minutes without distractions can boost our ability to remember new information.
“A lot of people think the brain is a muscle that needs to be continually stimulated, but perhaps that’s not the best way,” says Michaela Dewar at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK.
To store them long-term, new memories must be consolidated, a process thought to happen while we sleep. But at least some consolidation may occur while we’re awake, says Dewar – all you need is time out.
In 2012, her team found that people who had a 10-minute rest after hearing a story remembered 10 per cent more of it a week later than those who played a spot-the-difference game immediately afterwards.
“We dim the lights and ask them to sit in an empty, quiet room, with no mobile phones,” says Dewar. Most volunteers said they let their minds wander during this time.
Now Dewar and her colleagues have shown that rest can also consolidate spatial memories. Volunteers who rested after exploring a virtual-reality environment were 10 per cent more accurate at orientating themselves in relation to virtual landmarks (Hippocampus, doi.org/926).
People with amnesia who could not remember words from a list were able to after a few minutes’ rest
This is good news for insomniacs, suggesting that simply resting while awake can give us some of the memory benefits of sleep. “As long as you’re reasonably relaxed, you might still be experiencing some of the memory-consolidation processes,” says Gareth Gaskell at the University of York, UK.
The effect is particularly strong in people with amnesia. In a memory test of a list of words, eight of 12 volunteers with the condition were unable to remember any of them without a break. But after resting for 9 minutes, the same volunteers could recall between 30 and 80 per cent of the list.
“Most of them can’t lead a normal life because they can’t remember what they did 10 minutes ago,” says Dewar. The results suggest that people with amnesia may not have completely lost the ability to form new memories after all.
Dewar thinks that overstimulation may be what causes memory problems in amnesia. “If we try to reduce the amount of information going in, people with amnesia can form new memories,” she says.
(Image: Ozgur Donmaz/Getty)
This article appeared in print under the headline “A 10-minute rest can boost memory like sleep”
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