Now, you need not to make weird excuses to get that extra nap of five minutes. You can tell the people around that you are sharpening your memory by doing so.

In a new study, published in Nature Neuroscience, the German researchers found that the brain performs better as compared to the times when we are wide awake.

The research, which took into account twenty-four volunteers, gave the subjects 15 pairs of cards with pictures of animals and other common objects and asked them to memorize those, while putting them into a mild unpleasant smell.

Half the group was made to learn another set of cards with slight distinctions, whereas the other did the same after a small snooze. Meanwhile, both the groups were again exposed to the same smell.

It was found that during the retaining period, the group that was made awake could only recall back just 60% patterns, whereas the snooze group performed quite better by recalling no less than 85% of the patterns.

Susanne Diekelmann, who led the study, reasoned: "Reactivation of memories had completely different effects on the state of wakefulness and sleep. Based on brain imaging data, we suggest the reason for this unexpected result is that already during the first few minutes of sleep, the transfer from hippocampus to neocortex has been initiated".