Hi, I’m Dr. Sara C. Mednick, author of “Take a Nap! Change Your Life” and Assistant Professor of Department of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside. My research in the science of napping shows that without a midday rest, we are not able to perform at optimal levels throughout the day. In fact, our performance falls apart. Napping maintains and even boosts our skills. We study the role of sleep in a variety of cognitive domains, such as creative problem solving, verbal memory, perceptual learning, object learning, and statistical learning. In my lab, we use sleep, pharmacology, and functional magnetic resonance imaging as our investigative tools to understand underlying mechanisms across these domains of memory and learning. Beyond the lab, I am interesting in helping people learn how to get the most out of their sleep. We are working with corporations and theatrical dance companies, putting the tools we study in the lab to the test in the real world. Get to know your own sleep! It’s a great step towards a healthy, productive, balanced life.
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