Jessica P.

Naps and Creativity. September 29, 2009. Joyce Gramza. sciencecentral.com

In this experiment scientist tested to see if naps helped creativity. Volunteers were given a test in the morning and a test in the afternoon with creative problem solving. In between test scientist hooked the people up to a machine to see their brain waves, which showed their sleep stages, and after that half of the volunteers got a nap and the other half didn't. The half that didn't sleep got to sit on a couch until the next test. This revealed weather the sleep affected the memory of the people and if the people were able to utilize the problems from the morning to help them in the afternoon. The independent variable would be the amount of sleep you got(if you got a nap or not) and the dependent would be if the amount of sleep affected your memory or your ability to utilize the information in the morning in the afternoon testing. The conclusion was that the napping did not affect the memory but did help the people utilize the information from the morning in the afternoon testing. I thought this was a good experiment because it showed how sleeping affected you memory and your ability to use previous information learned in later circumstances. It could be improved though by making sure everyone gets the same amount of sleep because it takes different people a different amount of time to fall asleep and different people sleep better than others. A good experiment to follow this one would be to see if how long you sleep at night affects how you function during your daily activities.