Sleep optimizes motor skills

Men's Fitness, March, 2003

If you want to improve your finger skills, head for bed. According to a German study, people who slept after learning a new motor activity enhanced their skill speed by about 33 percent and reduced their error rate by 30 percent compared to subjects who stayed awake.

"Practicing a motor skill [such as playing a sport or a musical instrument] triggers a process of memory consolidation that continues for hours after practice has ended, and becomes manifest in an improved skill at later testing," states the report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "In humans, the formation of motor-skill memories essentially benefits from sleep."

The results were independent of whether sleep occurred during daytime or nighttime. The effects were also stable when researchers delayed retesting for 24 hours until all the subjects could sleep, which excluded the factor of sleep loss.

The research, which took place at the University of Lubeck, is among the first to suggest that sleep helps build procedural or "how-to" memory as well as the learning and retention of facts and events.