How Much Sleep Do We Need to Improve Performance?

A study by researchers at brown gives us some clues. The team set out to identify what exactly happens in the brain during sleep that contributes to this performance improvement. Three hours seems to be enough to observe the beneficial effect of sleep on motor scale improvement. Would more than three hours be even more helpful? Well, it's not clear what the optimal dose of sleep might be. It takes some time to get into deep sleep, so a quick 20 minute nap is probably not long enough to produce these sorts of performance improvements. But i've had enough students who share stories with me about how much of a difference sleeping made in their learning that it definitely does seem to be worth making time for.