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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday May 20 2018, @05:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the sleep-on-it dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Sleep is known to be important for creative thinking, but exactly how it helps and what role each sleep stage -- REM and non-REM -- plays remains unclear. A team of researchers have now developed a theory, outlined in an Opinion published May 15 in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, to explain how the interleaving of REM and non-REM sleep might facilitate creative problem solving in different but complementary ways.

"Suppose I give you a creativity puzzle where you have all the information you need to solve it, but you can't, because you're stuck," says first author Penny Lewis, a professor at the Cardiff University School of Psychology. "You could think of that as you've got all the memories that you need already, but you need to restructure them -- make links between memories that you weren't linking, integrate things that you weren't integrating."

Studies show that this kind of restructuring often happens while we are asleep, so Lewis and her co-authors drew on that literature, as well as physiological and behavioral data, to create a model of what might be happening during each stage. Their model proposes that non-REM sleep helps us organize information into useful categories, whereas REM helps us see beyond those categories to discover unexpected connections.

[...] "So, what we propose is that, if you're stuck on some kind of problem, that problem is salient, and we know that salient things are replayed," Lewis says. "The slightly hypothetical part is that, when something else is randomly activated in the cortex that has an element that's similar, you'll form a link." These surprising links may be the creative leaps required to solve a problem.

-- submitted from IRC

Penelope A. Lewis, Günther Knoblich, Gina Poe. How Memory Replay in Sleep Boosts Creative Problem-Solving. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2018; 22 (6): 491 DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2018.03.009


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by anubi on Sunday May 20 2018, @07:57AM (3 children)

    by anubi (2828) on Sunday May 20 2018, @07:57AM (#681805) Journal

    I think we all know this, but I will run it up the flagpole to see what I get of it...

    My personal experience is if I do not get enough sleep, I can still function, but going through the day is like me driving under the influence. I do poor judgement ( err even poorer judgment than usual ), and forget creativity. Give me a box of screws and bolts and a bunch of holes, I'll get 'em in there eventually, and I am not much better than that.

    Your average fast food guy would run rings around me.

    I do not know why I need it so much, but if I don't get it, I am not worth anything.

    If I did not get any REM sleep, well it counts as meditation, not sleep. Its like getting onto the toilet, but did not pass anything. I need to meditate, too. But that is not sleep.

    I am of the belief that I defrag when I am asleep... too much ON time, and my primary memory cache is so clogged its useless. I get the idea long-term memory takes time and repetitious thought to build. Damn near all insights I get on how to do things come to me when I am at rest. If under pressure, I just become yet another deer in the headlights - just sit there - frozen - inactive - and shit happens, as anything I do, unthought out, is apt to be even worse.

    ( Maybe I keep recalling the time I got spooked at a red light by oncoming fire truck and sirens, and I damn near killed myself darting in FRONT of the fire truck! It would have been better for all had I simply frozen right then and there. I was trying to clear the intersection, but was too slow to figure out the fire truck was simply going to use the lanes going the other way, which were completely clear at the time... all I seemed to think of is "there's a clear path out of here", and my thought line was down the line of "I don't care which way I am going, as long as its out of HERE!!! And it was terribly wrong. This kind of crap happens way too often to me when I act without premeditation ).

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 20 2018, @08:33AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 20 2018, @08:33AM (#681811)

    Sleep is the brain's garbage collection.

    • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday May 20 2018, @11:55PM

      by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday May 20 2018, @11:55PM (#681991) Homepage

      To elaborate, you can feel it if you remember your dream, how in dreams insignificant events of the day somehow become prominent.

      Unfortunately, I've rarely had lucid dreams which provided me musical inspiration or the solution to a difficult problem. Maybe that's what acid's for.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 20 2018, @10:30AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 20 2018, @10:30AM (#681827)

    Some people are already aware that this type of thing takes place. Not through scientific study, but just life experience.

    Most nights before I go to sleep I review the biggest programming or design issue that I need to work on the next day. In the morning I usually have a good jump on it, or have it completely worked out. I'm not sure when I figured this out, but I've been doing this for as long as I can remember simply because it works for me.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @04:15AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @04:15AM (#682525)

      Which is why I keep telling people scrum meetings should be at the end of your day, not the beginning. Sum up everything you did that day and provide a quick blurb about what you're planning on doing tomorrow. Then your brain has more time to work on it as you sleep, so tomorrow you'll have a higher chance of better solutions. Compared to at the start of your day saying what you did yesterday and what you plan on doing the next few hours.

      I'm not aware of any studies on this. But so far people just call me an idiot. That may be true, but so might be the productivity improvement. The two things aren't mutually exclusive.

  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 20 2018, @07:41PM

    I discovered that I could solve homework problems in my sleep

    I had to seriously work on them the night before. When I woke up I had the answers

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
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