Good news! “Napping is linked to a larger brain”

My brain should fill our whole bedroom.

When it comes to napping, two key variables that can skew data are age and sickness. Older and sicker people tend to nap more often and for longer because they are more fatigued. The researchers found that the people with the gene variants linked to napping had slightly larger brains than people without those gene variants, about 1.3% larger. That might sound small, but the authors of the study noted that it can be quite consequential.

but alas … it may not matter much –

“Our finding of a larger total brain volume in those who habitually nap is approximately equivalent to 2.6 to 6.5 years of difference in aging,” they wrote. “In addition, this difference approximately equates to the difference in brain volume between people with normal cognitive function and mild cognitive impairment.”

Whoa, sounds like one can’t afford not to nap! But don’t stop reading to “hit the hay” in the hopes of bulking up your brain just yet. Other findings from the study suggest that this result may not truly be meaningful. After all, there was no difference between nappers and non-nappers in the volume of their hippocampus, a brain region key to memory formation and one of the first regions to suffer damage in Alzheimer’s disease. There was also no difference in the two measures of cognitive performance they used for comparison: reaction time and memory.

And –

“The napping habits of UK Biobank participants were self-reported, which might not be entirely accurate, and the ‘napping’ signature overlapped substantially with the signature for cognitive outcomes in the study, which makes the causal link weaker.”

Additionally, as the brain is easily the most metabolically expensive organ in the body, it’s quite possible that people with larger brains simply need to nap more, rather than napping actually boosting their brain size.