Whether you're right-handed or left-handed, power naps can help you focus better after you wake up. But righties may be getting the biggest benefits of little midday shut-eye. Those are the findings of a study done at the Georgetown University Medical Center and presented at Neuroscience 2012, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans.
The researchers were surprised to discover that the left and right hemispheres of the brain behaved differently during the resting state. A release from the society quotes Andrei Medvedev, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Center for Functional and Molecular Imaging at Georgetown as saying, "That was true no matter which hand a participant used. The right hemisphere was more integrated in right-handed participants, and even stronger in the left-handed."
The release explains that the researchers found that when a participant napped, the right hemisphere of the brain "talked more to itself and to the left hemisphere than the left hemisphere communicated within itself and to the right hemisphere." Consequently, the scientists wonder whether righties might get an extra brain boost from the additional activity of the right brain during naps since righties use the left brain more when they're awake.
