Sleep spindles are essential for moving memories from the hippocampus to the cortex and are highly correlated with intelligence and consolidation capacity.

“the number that we produce per minute is well correlated with our intelligence in the first place and that no matter what your intelligence is and no matter what your sleep spindle density is, if you're learning something during the day and increase your sleep spindle density, it's really almost per”

Engaging in NSDR or short naps immediately following a learning session can significantly accelerate the rate of learning.

“if immediately after-- and it was immediately after the learning, the actual performance of this task, people took a 20-minute non-sleep deep-rest protocol or took a shallow nap, so lying down, feet slightly elevated, perhaps, just closing their eyes, no sensory input, the rates of learning were sig”

Sleep before learning prepares the brain to encode new information, and sleep after learning helps consolidate and cement those memories.

“I think I've conceptualized it in three different stages or three different buckets of a benefit the first is that we need sleep before learning to prepare your brain to initially imprint and lay those memory traces down but then you need to sleep after learning to take those sort of freshly minted ”