According to a new study, sleeping for at least 8 hours in a day can help improve memory, as reported by NDTV.

According to researchers, people were better at remembering faces and names when they got eight-hour sound sleep after seeing those faces and names for the first time. While a couple of studies have looked at how sleep might affect our ability to learn new faces and names, no previous studies have looked at the impact of a full night of sleep in between learning and being tested.

“We found that when participants were given the opportunity to have a full night’s sleep, their ability to correctly identify the name associated with a face – and their confidence in their answers – significantly improved,” explained Jeanne F Duffy, associate neuroscientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH).

Participants in the study underwent testing in a controlled environment while staying at BWH’s centre for clinical investigation. They were shown 20 photos of faces with corresponding names from a database of over 600 colour photos of adult faces and asked to memorise them. After a 12-hour period, they were then shown the photos again with either a correct or incorrect name.

In addition to answering whether or not the correct name was shown, participants were asked to rate their confidence on a scale of one to nine. When given an opportunity to sleep for up to eight hours, participants correctly matched 12 percent more of the faces and names.

Read the full story at www.ndtv.com