The nap manifesto
2. Speed up your motor performance.
While most people think of motor learning in terms of an ability to play guitar chords, improve a swim stroke or perform a plié, you don’t have to be a musician, athlete or dancer to benefit from faster motor performance.
All of us engage in tasks that involve coordination, whether we’re typing at a keyboard, operating machinery, changing a tire or bagging groceries. A Harvard study demonstrated that the speed of a learned motor performance is the same in nappers as in those who have had a full night of sleep.
3. Improve your accuracy.
Making mistakes costs time, money, energy and sometimes even people’s lives. While greater speed usually involves sacrificing accuracy, napping offers a valuable exemption from this general rule. So whether you shoot baskets or firearms, play sonatas or golf, cut diamonds or hair, a nap helps you get it right.
4. Make better decisions.
What are you going to eat for lunch? Should you ask for a raise or wait awhile? What stock should you buy? Or should you sell? Every day, all day, we make decisions—both trivial and huge. Of course, some decisions are so significant that lives can hang in the balance. Airplane takeoffs and landings require high-precision timing and the ability to read, monitor and react to a wide variety of controls. Pilots who are allowed to nap in the cockpit commit fewer judgment errors on takeoff and landings than those who aren’t.
5. Improve your perception.
Think how much you depend on your eyes, your ears and, to a lesser extent, your taste, touch and smell. Without the ability to fine-tune your sensory/perceptual systems, you wouldn’t be able to hone in on the important environmental messages and filter out the mass of distracting sensory information that bombards all of us on a regular basis. Research shows that a nap can be as effective as a night of sleep in improvement of perceptual skills. Driving, cooking, appreciating music or art, reading, proofreading, quality control and even bird-watching are all enhanced after a nap.
kassandra