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'Just Sleep On It' Solves Tricky Problems?
An anonymous reader writes "CBC news reports that the effectiveness of 'sleeping on it' when faced with a difficult task may have more than just anecdotal roots. 66 students were trained to perform a calculation on an eight digit number using two simple rules which would take seven steps to complete. A different method existed to perform the same calculation 'almost instantly', but was not shown to the students. After eight hours, where half the students were allowed to sleep and the other half remained awake, 60% of the rested and 22% of the wakeful students discovered the more efficient method."
If nothing else, it means I've been thinking very hard indeed while at work this morning.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I've just forwarded this to my boss, sleeping on the job is now a good thing.
... for engineering/law majors, you insensitive clod!!!
(Seriously, I hardly got more than 4 hours a night, which I doubt is enough time to let your brain sort out, store, and "solve" these problems!)
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
I know I've solved Calculus projects in my sleep before. The tricky part is trying to remember it when you wake up.
If it's not on fire, it's a software problem.
too bad I do all my homework on the last day.. ;)
Now sales of those tapes that will help you "improve your life while you sleep" will REALLY take off.
Never confuse volume with power.
I think that's what mgmt consultants call "internalizing" - turning something you know intellectually, that you just learned and have to make an effort to think of, into something intuitive, that just automatically occurs.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I thought it was pretty well-established that sleep plays a role in post-analysis of the days accumulatd information ? There have been too-many-to-count articles on the subject in New Scientist / Scientific American ...
There must be an evolutionary advantage to having a time when nothing else was going on to do something, and what else apart from the days events could occupy a brain if it has no external sensory input... I seriously doubt all the higher life-forms on the planet would do it if there wasn't a good reason....
Simon
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
sleeping, that's how I managed to graduate. (Yaaaawn, goin' to bed)
This was a common strategy used by the fictional middle brother in the series of books called "The Great Brain" by JD Fitzgerald. It tracked the deals and schemes of a wily kid in early 1900s Utah, as seen by his awestruck little brother. He'd think on his hardest mental problems just before going to bed, and would usually awake with an inspiration.
I often employ the same strategy, with mixed results, but it's better than not coming up with any ideas at all.
[
Maybe I can use this as an excuse to get in a quick nap at work =)
It'd be interesting to see what type of sleep these students had. I regularly take 20 minute naps that leave me refreshed and able to better handle problems. Can I assume that traditional / deep sleep is better than light sleep / napping?
And what about induced sleep through alcohol or medication? Could it be beneficial to have the ability to "sleep on demand" to solve a tough problem?
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
I remember reading somewhere that Einstein would sleep for 14 hours or more at a time. And Margret Thatcher could get by on just a couple of hours.
Usually I get the best coding results after 16 hours of constant work without sleep. In the end I suddenly see new options which came never into my mind before. The same holds for my coworkers. So from personal experience I strongly doubt their result.
Furthermore a single test with just 60 people is not enough to create a meaningful statistical evaluation of the experiment.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I've noticed that I tend to make numerous grammar and spelling errors that I don't notice if I type essays, reports, or slashdot posts when I'm tired. Errors that seemed correct at the time I typed them stand out sore thumbs when I read through them again, especially when I've just woken up in the morning or something. I think this would apply to methods at solving problems, mathematical or otherwise. Your brain simply doesn't work as well and as efficiently when its tired than when its well rested and fresh.
Countless times I have been stumped unable to compile a program I was writing or lost trying to finish up a program. The program keeps growing in lines, but I still never finish. I find if I goto sleep in those situations, I wake up with fresh ideas and a means to an end..
I can remember doing that more than ever back when I was 13 programming with TurboC++ for my WWIV BBS. These days I use other methods to keep me on track, but I still find it happening.
I find I solve a lot of bugs in the shower. Or while out buying lunch. Or anywhere that my brain is not engaged in the current task, but where that current task is something other than the bug I'm trying to fix.
It's almost letting your subconscious thought processes work on the problem instead of trying to tackle it directly.
The upshot is that I feel no shame in saying "I'm not going to fix that bug today. I'll fix it tomorrow" when I'm stumped on something. Or a tricky design problem, etc - works for most problem solving situations.
Of course, this is all anecdotal..
~Cederic
I'm going to post something +5 Insightful, but I have to take a nap first. Check back later.
daed si luap
Anyone who has ever crammed all night for a final knows how your brain seems to turn to mush after the test is over from the fatigue of it all.
Who knows, maybe now that it's been scientifically proven, businesses will realize that people are actually more productive when not forced to work ridiculous amounts of mandatory, unpaid overtime.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3418017.stm
What's worse is when you actually do have pencils and paper nearby and you manage to scribble something down at 3 am., it's either illegible or utterly surreal at 8 am.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
When you find a solution in your dreams, or after you wake up, it could be taken as a solution from intuition (subconcious mind?).
Oppose logical solutions, which must be thought out carefully, and usually in the waking (concious) mind.
People should be trained in both fields of thinking, to exploit the subconcious intuition and the concious logic. (Mentats from Dune?)
The other day I had to remember a name from ten years ago. I could picture the person but no name was forthcoming. Several hours later, while doing something quite menial, and not actively thinking about earlier, the name just suddenly appeared.
A couple of friends remarked that this was quite common for them, but I'd never really thought of it before. It seems some dark area of your brain remembers tasks you're trying to achieve, or things you're trying to remember, and sets about working on them in the background, while you get on with something else entirely.
This may be why people often come up with great ideas in the shower or while driving in the car, as their minds were 'set the task' earlier, and finally it's finished. Not too unlike a computer I guess, but certainly cool when you do it yourself. You realize that brain has a lot more tricks up its sleeve than are mentioned in the handbook.
Slice open mr big arse and stick in some bacon
After eight hours, where half the students were allowed to sleep and the other half remained awake, 60% of the rested and 22% of the wakeful students discovered the more efficient method."
So... what you are saying is that sleep depravation inhibits problem solving?
--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor?
American Weblog in London
why Bush has those bags under his eyes
Anyone who read The Great Brain books as a kid has known this to be gospel truth all along. No surprise to me :-). It's amazing what you learn from reading fiction. Even juvenile fiction.
This method was employed by many creative people over the years. A famous case is the discovery of the molecular structure of benzene by Friedrich August von Kekule after he had a dream about snakes whirling. He famously said "Let us learn to dream, gentlemen." I like to use this technique myself to boost creativity.
The method used to sleep actively on top is to slacken by using hypnosis, meditation, progressive relaxation or any other method which you know (a simple manner with the breath deeply several times all as affirming ). Now you speak the spirit without knowledge and ask for your spirit without knowledge to provide a solution during the night to you problem. Now let go from all the concern and go to sleep. It can be not also easy in the beginning to make this but with the practice you can become an expert with it.
Have a paper and a pencil with range of the hand so that you can write your thoughts and solutions with your problem as soon as you awake. Just continue to practise this and each time you have success by solving your problems by the sleep on top you will amplify your self-esteem and will increase the probability of success the next time.
Please be understanding that English is not my first language, Thank you ^_^.
... being well slept keeps the mind clear? I thought that it was common knowledge, known for many years, well beyond having to experiment in this manner.
:) Keeping a notepad and pen next to the bed is somewhat handy, if a little sad.
I know that if I'm coding, and have been for a while, the old brain does slow down. Normally in those situations, with my alarm set to go off in 4 hours time, I decide to go to sleep. What happens to me is I normally figure out what I was trying to do in those glorious moments when my brain has given up trying to stay in a concious state.
All too often I have to get up and write down my solution before it vanishes forevermore
Because of this, I now realize why all my "Natalie Portman Squirming Nude in Hot Grits" dreams abruptly end with a Light Bulb Over her head, and just below that, a Do Loop, an equation, or the name of some obscure (.jar) file that has a utility for the previous day's problem.
( from wikipedia )
"The chemist Kekule was the first to deduce the ring structure of benzene; after years of studying carbon bonding, benzene and related molecules, the solution to the benzene structure came to him in a dream of a snake eating its own tail. Upon waking was inspired to deduce the ring structure of benzene. "
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I am thinking of something smart and funny to say here... but I haven't had my nap yet...
I think all this really shows is that yes, your problem-solving skills do indeed deteriorate if some scientist keeps you awake all night.
....leave a pencil and some paper next to your bed!
Print this article and keep a copy. Next time your boss catches you sleeping on the job, just show him/her the article and tell him/her that yo are just working on solving the problem
This happens so often with me it's almost a standard procedure. If I'm working late trying to fix a problem, debug a difficult issue, or find that really elegant solution to a tricky problem, I leave it until the next morning. Almost every time, the solution is then obvious, clear, and works immediately.
Most likely it's because the unconcious mind needs space to work, and concentrating on the issue is counter-productive. Someone once wrote a nice article about why it helps to be stupid when you want to play football, because _thinking_ is not what you want to do when you're standing in front of the goal with an open shot.
Similarly in more intellectual challenges, the subconcious mind does a large part of the work but needs to be left alone to do its thing.
There are other ways to get the same effect:
- playing music while working
- going for a brisk walk (not heavy sport, because that tires you out)
- smoking a joint (depends on the person but for many people this does the trick)
- playing a game (solitaire?)
But sleeping is definitely the best way, probably because the brain is designed to do exactly this.
Incidentally, it works for social problems too. Having trouble with a colleague? Sleep on it, they say.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Poincare: "For fifteen days I struggled to prove that no functions analogous to those I have since called Fuchsian functions could exist; I was then very ignorant. Every day I sat down at my work table where I spent an hour or two; I tried a great number of combinations and arrived at no result. One evening, contrary to my custom, I took black coffee; I could not go to sleep; ideas swarmed up in clouds; I sensed them clashing until, to put it so, a pair would hook together to form a stable combination. By morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those derived from the hypergeometric series. I had only to write up the results which took me a few hours. - Henri Poincare, "Science et Methode": "
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
this experiment is fundementally flawed... would it be that sleep is condusive to finding solutions or that exhaustion is detrimental to the ability to concentrate... it is fundementally flawed and no good at drawing conclusions...
Isn't it true that a population of 30 individuals usually shows a stastically normalized distribution? So why is 60 individuals not enough?
I finally have a REAL excuse to sleep through copm-sci!
Hmm. I thought experiments provided evidence of a phenomenon. Here's a thought experiment - How do you prove a phenomenon? Induction? Contrapositive? Experimental results?
I thought not.
:wq ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I used to take showers when I couldn't figure stuff out in college. [Insert joke about the smelly CS student] I found that just getting away from the code for a bit and doing just about anything that's not terribly distracting (video games, TV, etc.) could let your mind wander. My roomate would laugh when I would get changed and get right back on the computer and solve a problem that I had been bitching about for hours.
Special note: Dry yourself thoroughly, enthusiasm is no reason to get electricuted.
66 students split in half = 2 groups of 33.
.212, or 21% .242, or 24%
.578, or 58% .606, or 61%
7/33 =
8/33 =
19/33 =
20/33 =
You should not get 22%, or 60% of a group of 33 students. (Yeah, I know, maybe the groups weren't split exactly in half).
This is far from new, and cognitive psychologists have had excellent evidence of it for decades. It's called an incubation period, and the benefit is a result of trying new methods - if you keep at something, you tend to get "stuck" in one line of thinking, and stopping (or removing focus) allows your brain to more easily try something "new".
G
http://psycho-cybernetics.com/
The way to do it is:
1) Put a notebook and pencil on the table.
2) Take a good distance of about ten paces.
3) Run for the pencil and spit out the inventive concept on paper.
JeR
I've figured out more algorithms/problems in my sleep than while awake. I've spent fruitless hours trying to figure them out awake, and then I dream a proper solution. Kinda weird, but maybe I can convince my boss to pay me for it somehow...
Saw this on CNN yesterday and was able to find many examples of this type of behavior in my friends and family. The theories on memory and its storage while you sleep are really cool, actually.
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
Congratulations to your wife. It's nice to know that there are still people in this world who live up to the idea that there are some things more important than money.
I shall leave you to celebrate in whatever manner you think most appropriate.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I also like to let my brain do the same things with problems. You can sweat and fret over some technical or even personal problem, and hack out a solution that seems like it's the best you have (and yet seems inadequate), or you just let it soak for a day or two or even a week. You never force it completely out of your mind, and occasionally bring it back to mull actively, but not too much more than just running your hands over the surface of it. One of those times, you feel a flash of inspiration, or a depth of understanding that wasn't there before, and that's when you close in for the kill. Your mind gets it.
Anyway, that's the best I can do to use words to describe the proess I use to think and act creatively. I have found that my mind works in similar ways with regard to learning new things, such as juggling or a foreign language. I might practice my juggling for a week, and not see much progress, then take a week or two off. When I pick back up, lo, I've made a significant improvement.
Why our President is so effective.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was inspired to write the epic poem Kubla Khan while asleep.
Hehehe. Coleridge's note (published with the poem) says:
In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair...
That anodyne would have been laudanum -- opium mixed in alcohol.
I swear, some of the most effective thinkers I've known have had a notebook and pen hanging from a string within reach of the pot.
I get some of my best ideas when I'm sitting on the can--maybe it's sort of the meditative aspect of just being in a sensory deprivation chamber, staring at tiles for a few minutes.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Did your wife eat a lot of paint chips as a kid?
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
/. (gay) sex trolls: what is the state of the art
Folding@Home for your brain, using up that idle processing time. :)
Now if only I could figure out a way to install Folding@Home on my brain, it'd keep me warm even if I was butt naked in a snow storm. :D
n/t
Bob
Back when the Rubic Cube came out, I had it nearly solved but was stumped as to how to move the bottom corners without disturbing the rest of the cube. On night, as I was going to sleep, I saw the cube floating in front of me. It was making the exact sequence of moves I was looking for. It would then reset and do it again - over and over. When I got up the next morning, I grabbed the cube and completed the solution in a matter of seconds.
.
. From that point, I knew that sleeping on a problem really worked.
.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
I wonder whether the effect (which I have long believed to be real) is the result of active processing during sleep or the selective extinguishment of the false partial results. "Society of mind" type theories model mental processes as numerous competing "agents". The competition of false partial results with the correct (or promising) partial results may block the emergence of the correct result as the victor. During sleep, perhaps the partial results with lower "fitness" are selectively extinguished, leaving the person with a smaller pool of "fitter" partial results or, in extreme circumstances, the answer.
You don't think the guys who didn't sleep at all were too tired to even think at that point? naw of course not. Deprive me of a night's sleep and see how well I do anything.
They didn't even have a control group.
Liberty.
Please mod the parent post down and read the other replies in this thread particularly the three genuinely insightful replies posted so far by dlr03, gowen, nacturation and jrm228. Judging by his sig, the parent poster is just another Mensa troll.
First I don't get work done because I'm always reading slashdot.
Now I find out I'm getting even less work done because Slashdot posts articles around the clock and I don't get enough sleep reading them all the time.
Seriously, isn't it appropriate to post this so freaking early?
gaaaaahhh!!!
I get about 4-6 hours of sleep a night just because I have so many projects (both home and work) that I am interested in, there just isn't enough time in a day.
I do often wonder how some people are able to get so much accomplished within the same amount of hours I have (and possibly even sleep more)! One example is that I've got a friend who keeps a pretty decent blog going, takes more pictures per day than I do (between 200 and 500), writes and records his own music, is a webmaster for a hospital (his day job), is simultaneously learning C, Tcl/Tk and Java, and has plenty of time for multiple women. How the !%#^ does he do it? I've asked him, and he's told me that he just focuses on the important stuff. ???
So what say you folks. I think a lot of us geeks like to burn the candle on both ends by nature. And I know that I do a lot more than my semi/non-geek friends. But, what about people like my friend? Do they have some mystical ability that some of us are lacking? Uber-time management? It's a puzzle to me. And now... sleeping is supposed to be GOOD for us?
Un-news
Or are the more rested people able to think more clearly. I'm not sure if I buy the "thought it up in a dream"... I think you can think more clearly when rested.
Yeah, I don't really believe in Open Sores in the workplace either. Nasty thing, that.
When I was a college student taking programming classes, I often woke up in the middle of the night with the solution to a programming problem. I'd then get up, write that piece of code and go back to sleep. I remember that one morning, I looked at the code I had written in the middle of the night and it made no sense. I knew it worked, but it made no sense.
I often delay tough problems at least a day to let my brain work on them, and it works a lot of the time. Just yesterday I was trying to fix a bug with some code and gave up. Sure enough, this morning I had a fairly good idea on how to address the issue.
I'm wondering what the problem/calculation was.
I just pooped your party.
This indeed does work. Sleep is very useful for solving difficult problems. For example, suppose you were tasked with printing pi to 6 digits. The sleep-deprived program may do something inefficient, like using arctan formulas, or summing series, or using Pascal's method, or calling the Mathematica module.. etc. etc.. The sleep-enabled program would look something like this:
/* Look busy for a while */
printf ("Beginning calculation. Please wait.\n");
sleep(20)
printf ("3.141592\n");
I solve most problems on the toilet. :)
but then again... maybe I should start sleeping on the toilet, and solve more problems
You're old school? I beta tested the motherf***ing abacus!
All these stories are based on an article published in Nature 427, 352 - 355 (http://www.nature.com).
A direct link to the abstract (summary) and, if you can, the full-text article
A comment on this article (in the same issue of Nature).
And the table of content of this Nature issue is here.
... I say nobody post on this subject until tomorrow. Then we'll compare the quality of the postings.
Oh, wait...
BTW, I'm an insomniac you insensitive clod!
how many of them called their smart buddies to find the efficient way because they were sleeping in class?
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
I have also played some excellent games of Tetris in my sleep, but that doesn't seem nearly as interesting.
Lasers Controlled Games!
I cannot tell you the number of times I've been struggling to finish something late in the day (and thinking I won't leave work until I do), only to give up, feel defeated for a little while, only to come in the next morning a solve it in 10 minutes.
Saw this story yesterday on ABCNEWS.com, Study: Sleep Essential for Creative Thinking, Sharper Memories . The thing I didn't understand was, didn't we already know this before? Students who sleep more tend to get better grades, students who sleep less, don't? But remember, as anyone who has taken an elementary logic or stats course, the first thing they teach you is: causation != correlation. For example, in the above instance, it could be that students who sleep less are from poorer families, and have to work more (read: jobs), thereby getting less sleep, while people who get more sleep are from more wealthy families, etc. I'd be interested in seeing the real study data instead of just a news article. Here's a paragraph from the ABCNEWS article that I thought was interesting:
History is dotted with incidents where artists and scientists have awakened to make their most notable contributions after long periods of frustration. For example, that's how Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev established the periodic table of elements and British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote his epic "Kubla Khan."
I'm surprized that this is news, really.
First of all, being well rested is always better than pulling an all-nighter (And for you college students, this is especially true for finals!). When you have rest, you're able to calculate, reason, and think creatively more effectively.
Second of all, there are lots of times when people (including myself) are doing something totally unrelated to a problem they've been working on, and come up with (or stumble upon) an answer. I'd like to see some study to find out how many problems are solved in the bathroom.
Seriously though, if you take your time, and are willing to be patient for a clean and effective answer to come to you, it usually will. If you cling on like some kind of psychotic problem tarrier, the answer you arrive at may not be the best one.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
done that. I keep a notepad and pencil next to my bed because I have a tendancy to wake up in the middle of the night with the solution to a scripting problem or config problem right on the tip of my tongue. I've got to write quickly though because my short term when I wake up is flashed in seconds. :-(
I've had many times where i hit a wall in a program or script i was writing and just said "i'll sleep on it" and about 90% of the time i come in to work the next day and figure it out in 5-10 minutes....
Otherwise, a voice recorder can be fun to have when your SO is talking in his sleep. Or for proving once and for all that his snoring is loud enough to wake the dead...
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
I've taken several classes on sleep, learning and how the brain works. It's really fascinating. However, the best reason I've heard for why sleep is necessary is to reprogram your brain. (It's not to recover the body at all; the body can function just fine, 24 hours a day, indefinitely.) If you think about it, a computer can run forever without needing to rest, but the brain is a lot different from a computer, it needs to process the activities of the day, needs to create new connections between memories and new pathways for various mental activities. Sleep allows the brain time to do this. Without periodic sleep the brain functions less and less effectively. (Think Windows with too many applications running.) If a person goes without sleep for too long the entire thing crashes. (Studies have shown that people can go without water longer than they can go without any type of sleep.)
Perhaps we're not too different from computers after all.
When growing up, my father would give similar advice to sleep on it. Is actual phrase would be to "let my subconscious work on the problem."
I don't know if that is actually what is happening, but it makes sense somewhat, and it has provided some good results for me.
It's amazing actually that it's taken so long for traditional science to study this. I'm positive this is a shared experience among coders and admins worldwide. Your brain turns off everything, but then runs like a "SETI@Home" kinda process on some problem you're consumed with. Come the morn, you've got all the code in your head ready to solve that problem you had no luck with all day the previous.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
Uh, no.
Coleridge was in an opium-induced stupor when he got the inspiration for the poem. Here are some sources that back this up (including comments from the poet himself):
You can read about the poem and its origins here, or you can read original notes on the poem from the author and others who knew him here. You can also read the original poem here.
--Mark
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
This news is dumb. It makes not sense to me. Can't fight... sleepiness... must... sleep... snore snore snore Boy, I feel refreshed! What a great concept. I'll have to learn more about this! BTW, does this make narcoleptics geniuses?
Yeah, I'd love a job that uses open sores!
I sometimes start dreaming computing problems in my sleep. When it's hot or I'm ill I'll often find myself dreaming infinite loops, which is not a pleasant!
I have also solved many major maths problems in my dreams. The problem is that when I go to read the proof I just can't seem to focus on the piece of paper in which it's written. Oh well, at least I can dream I'm a genius.
What is the inverse of the Matrix?
The way I had it explained to me as a kid was that it's like asking the records clerk for your mind a question.
If you keep *trying* to remember something, it's like you keep calling the guy back to the counter and otherwise pestering him such that he can't actually do the thing you're asking of him.
But if you're patient and let him work back there, he'll find the answer. Usually.
Went to sleep last night after working on a program all day which was generating SIGSEGV for no apparent reason ... this morning, I suddenly knew why.
Not just a myth.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte
you can turn on your brain's genius mode by repeating to yourself, as you fall asleep, something like "i'll be a genius when i wake up", over and over again til you fall asleep.
What if the problem you need to solve is "What the hell do I do with this plague-ridden, poisonous and syringe filled mattress?"
I'd say 'sleep on it' is definitely the wrong option. Think before you come up with these stupid answers, scientists. Stupid scientists.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
Elven reverie anyone? ^_^
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Take an 8-digit string formed from the numbers 1, 4, and 9. A series of two-digit comparisons is done. The result of the comparison is the same digit if they are the same, or the "missing" digit if they are different. That is, 1 1 -> 1, while 1 4 -> 9.
Start by comparing the first two digits, and from then on, compare your current result with the next digit in the string. Their example is 11449494, which leads to the results 1, 9, 1, 4, 4, 1, 9. The last result is the final answer.
The trick is that the original strings were "generated in such a way that the ... second [result] coincided with the final solution." People who found this trick were deemed to have gained insight into the pattern.
I think the study is bogus because of this. Sure, some people will notice the pattern, but careful people might choose to carry out the full calculation anyway, just to make sure. Any given string could follow the pattern or not. What they're demonstrating is how easily people can be tricked into finding patterns that may or may not be there. This kind of learning leads to racial profiling --- the result of the easy observation (race) implies the result of the more difficult one (criminality).
main(O){10<putchar((O--,102-((O&4)*16| (31&60>>5*(O&3)))))&&main(2+ O);}
LN2 is cool!
Honestly, ever since I've been married my 13 hours of sleep a night have gone right out the window. And with a baby now, I'm lucky if I get 5 solid hours of sleep a night. My career needs a divorce, damnit!
"Honey? You awake? Look, I have this very difficult problem at work..."
divorce is a myth, you'd still be married and God would be pissed.
I've actually had this happen with coding solutions, sometimes solving them in my sleep. The weirdest part is dreaming a solution THEN trying to recall it when you wake up.
Overall this isn't too surprising, considering the functions of sleep, and that in many cases coming back to a problem lets you take a fresh look.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
there are some things more important than money.
Not when you're running a company, dipshit. There are too many people depending on you to make them money.
I once had a particularly difficult assingment for a data structures class. I worked late into the night and eventually fell asleep laying on my laptop. I awoke around 6 the next morning and in my groggy stupor, changed something in the code and then returned to sleep. When I rewoke around 10, the program worked!
While I was glad the assignment was complete, I have no idea what I changed that morning or how/why that fixed the problem... behold the power of sleep programming.
- Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
It's not just a matter of relaxation, although that does have psychological effects. However, during REM sleep (when dreaming occurs) the brain synthesizes proteins that form long term memory. Long and short term memory are actually physiologically different. Short term memory are synapses created throughout the day on the fly, long term memory is created during REM sleep or during times when you may be zoning out (this is controversial). If finding innovative solutions can be statistically broken down as propotional to the amount of nueral connections involved in the processing of the question in the solution space, then it would make sense that people that sleep in REM sleep, which has a much higher level of brain activity, would be more apt to finding the innovative solution. However, it's nice to see that there are numbers that back this up.
Lemmings on the old Genesis. I was about nine years old and some of the levels were impossible to figure out. I used to go to bed to think about the problem, dream up this fantastic solution! Then when I tried it the following morning, it wouldn't work, because I'd remembered the level layout wrongly. Stupid brain.
qntm.org
I've noticed that great ideas often come to me while "taking a dump" or "watering the horses".
So, when You are in front of a great problem..go ease yourself:)
If I can't figure out something I just masturbate... and if I still can't figure it out 20 minutes later, I masturbate some more. It not only works the mind, but the body as well. Kinda tricky to pull off in social environments though.
I read through the article and may main thought was to see what the hell was the number problem? I wasnted to see how fast I cound figure out the quick easy way to do it, I searched and searched and couldn't find the actual problem listed anywhere.
Then I come back to Slashdot and searched through the posts and I can't find anyone even mentioning that the story doesn't say what the number problem was.
WTF? Am I the only geek on here who enjoys figuring puzzles? Did I get lost and stumble onto AOL or something?
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Tell me what's in the US that there is not in Switzerland ?
Ah, yes.... Fat women and tasteless rednecks. But I can live without these.
Reminds me of a Seinfeld episode...
I remember reading that this is why a lot of people dealing with depression sleep all the time. Somehow their brain realizes that it can solve problems when they sleep, so it makes them tired. Of course there are other factors (namely chemical) why they sleep, but this contributes. At least in some cases.
But this has been known for a while. Well, not known, but assumed? There were several mathematicians (I thought one was poincare, but I don't think so) that often spoke of how they would only solve problems once they stopped thinking about them and let their subconscious chew on them.
One of these mathematicians said how he proved whatever theorem after a day vacation to the beach when he was stepping off the train.
It was not Sofie Germaine so I say he.
"when life gets complicated, I like to take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner" - Hobbes.
Just like windows, if you have a problem difficult to solve, just sleep/reboot, and try again ;)
"Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad." -- Terry Pratchett
my second year we were doing MIPS (well, SPIM) assembly and this was the dreaded recursion assignment. I had my homework all coded up but it was not working right and i had NO idea why.
Reading the code seemed correct, running it produced the wrong answer. There was no interactive debugger facility available so i was kind of screwed. The assignment was due the following day so i was working quite hard on it trying to get it to work, but eventually i said to hell with it and went to bed.
I woke up early next morning (on my own, without an alarm) and immediately knew where my bug was. I sat down and had it fixed in minutes.
I literally opened my eyes, looked at the ceiling, and smiled, because I KNEW i knew what the fix was and had somehow awaked "smarter" than when i went to bed.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I've heard this before - take a nap, take a break, take your mind off it. It doesn't really work for me. I don't ever recall the answer to a problem coming to me in a dream. My dreams are already really strange, a kind of parallel reality where the laws of physics don't apply.
On a few occasions I thought I had come up with a really brilliant idea: an idea for a great novel, or the solution to a tricky problem - but when I woke up it turned out to be nonsense, or what I dreamed was a problem was really not one, so I wound up dreaming up a clever way of preventing people from walking into the sides of buildings, or to keep gasoline from accumulating on the bottoms of their shoes - something inane like that.
The only advantage I have found to taking a break is that sometimes when I work too long I drop into negative productivity - I am just trying so hard but am so tired I am hindering myself. So in that case, a break just brings me back to where I should be, not really any kind of breakthrough. However going away from something for very long also tends to make me lose interest in it, so there is a drawback to that approach too.
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
"In the experiments conducted by Wagner and his colleagues, volunteers tackled arithmetic problems and then took twenty minutes to masturbate furiously while being lectured on mathematics. A second group was instructed to fornicate with a set of oversized-novelty-foam-numeral-character figures. Those who reached orgasm were twice as likely to realize that there was a hidden rule that substantially simplified calculations."
So the next time you can't figure out how to solve a problem, just fuck it!
PS: I refuse to cite the source of this quotation.
I'll tell you what the Swiss have that the US doesn't... hundreds of millions in swiss francs stolen from the Jews. You've got us there.
Talk to someone who's bi-polar... in the manic state, they'll be getting by on only a handful of hours per night (3-4 hours) and their productivity will be extremely high. That is, if they can focus the energy and not just start projects willy-nilly without completion.
During the downswing they often want to do nothing else but sleep.
Sometimes I get these dreams where I'm playing this really good music and I know I'm dreaming, so I try to make a point of remembering it. But when I wake up, I only remember a bit or so, or can't remember totally and that sucks. Once in a while I remember a fair bit more and it sounds much better. Frustrating.
;).
Worse if I make myself wake up and the music just starts slipping away in my blurry just awoken state. Grrrr.
There've been a few times where I wake up (don't remember any dream or anything) go up to the piano and bang out something, and whoa sounds good - where did that come from. Thing is, I can't bang on the piano in the middle of the night, so only happens when I get to sleep in.
Maybe it's time to get one of those keyboards and headphones
I have found myself struggling with a problem, I mean really struggling. I will eventually exhaust myself, throw in the towel and go to bed.
When I do this I often feel like I can solve the problem, but I am spinning my wheels in my attempt.
I will go to sleep, sleep 8 hours and when I wake up I will open my eyes and at the very front of my head will be the solution.
This has happened to me so many times that it is actually a tool I use to solve problems.
I think my Zen Master can help you, people.
I want you to pay attention to every word I say.
To focus on the sound of my voice
and to feel the energy.
The energy that begins to emerge
from deep inside of you,
to help you
to break free
of any fear that you
may be holding inside of you.
As you listen to the sound of my voice
allow my voice to be a way,
a method
That's it.
Just let go.
slooowwwww down.
allowing your brain
and your mind
to ssllloooowwww
dddoooowwwnnn...
That's it...
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
Another is the learning/forming memories problem which has been discussed here before. 8 hours seems to be the magic number here.
The last is the most interesting. It's where those solutions come from. What part of the mind is involved. It's not the logical train of thought part of the mind, and it does not communicate verbally. It's rather subtle and where the idle/sleep part comes in. If you're in deep concentration you may miss that flash of intuition. But you need that intense concentration up front to communicate the problem to that non-linear part of your mind as far as I can tell. You don't get so many intuitive flashes for problems you don't obsess on.
The other interesting thing is since that communication from the non-linear part is non-verbal, the solution may be misinterpreted. Or it could be it was just wrong, it's hard to tell the difference. This has happend to me at least once, got it completely backwards. I find it helps to apply formal methods to your idea to sanity check it. A form of error correction I guess. It will also help you understand it later on when your intuitive hunch wears off and you revisit the idea and have no idea what you were thinking of when you had it.
In a related story, "researchers" did a study and "discovered" that sleep allows participants to feel less tired. Who would have thought?
Has anyone else who is learning to play a musical instrument had this experience:
Say you're learning guitar, and there's a chord or finger-picking sequence or something that's very difficult (well, at least for me). If I practice it over and over, I might never quite get it. But after a night's sleep when I come back to it, I find that somehow overnight it's "soaked in". Like the rest time was important for my brain to assimilate the practice, so that afterward it is much easier than before.
Someone told me the same thing happened to her when playing piano. She couldn't get it the first time she practiced (repeating the lesson over and over), but when she came back to it the next day, it felt much more natural.
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
While in high school and college, I was the beneficiary of an extreme version of this.
I'd routinely stumble on a hard calculus problem; after a bit I'd move on to other problems, come back to the problem one last time, and then go to bed.
I had a recurring dream where there was a book at my workspace I now jokingly refer to as the "Book of all knowledge." In the dream, I'd encounter the problem, open the book like any other reference book, and it would always open to the page with the answer to the problem on it, fully worked out step-by-step as good calculus answers should be.
When I awoke, I knew the answer and essentially copied down the result from the dream, understanding how I got there due to the step-by-step nature of the answer.
Obviously this didn't work all that great for tests.
Seriously, though, it's probably one of my fondest memories of advanced math, having the coolest book in the world in my dreams. I also suspect it points out that problem solving even in very technical domains is a creative, right-brain process and not nearly as logical as people would be led to believe.
I have insomnia.
The usual reason I'm not able to sleep? Because I've got something I need to do! If I have a problem to work on, I can't just shut my brain off and go to sleep. I'll lay on the bed thinking about it... all... night... long.
It's frustrating. Both that I don't have the problem finished, and that I'm not sleeping.
Solution? Sleeping pills.
In any case, there aren't enough hours in the day to get things done, so I really only sleep 5-6 hours a night.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
I daydream in class all the time.. I've also done the same while on my summer internship. I have have something going for me that the fulltime guys dont.
It seems to me it is perfectly reasonable that the students who did not sleep may have had their performance impaired because they were tired.
It doesn't necessarily suggest that the sleeper's brains were doing anything other than being idle.
Godwin's law has once more being validated
Has being validated... bzzt
Stumble down from the mountains or up from the lake, come to America and enjoy yourself. Or just sit there and fume like the rest of the pathetic, bitter Euro-trash that makes Americans like myself smile and shake our heads.
Good game.
I have experienced it lot of times and I have come to make use of this. If I am not able to tackle a problem I go home and the next morning for sure I have a possible solution
I some how feel our brains expands it's horizon when we sleep. Maybe a WiFi connection to the mother brain :)
I used to believe in "dreaming" solutions to math or coding problems, but it rarely actually works for me (whatever I work out in my sleep doesn't turn out to be the actual cause). But a good night's sleep does two things:
(a) Being rested lets you think more clearly; you're refreshed and more energetic. That's what "rested" means, after all: peace, ease, or refreshment resulting from sleep or the cessation of an activity.
(b) Walking away from a problem gets you out of the mental rut that keeps you looking at the same set of non-working solutions. Hitting that mental reset button causes you to go through the process again and find the stumbling block that you're missing.
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
- 15 of 66 students gives 22,727% (rounded: 23%, not 22%)
- 40 of 66 students gives 60,606% (rounded 61%, not 60%)
Well, it doesn't matter: the message is the same: sleep more, especially if you're a neurologist doing statistics.i thought this was a known thing. i even remember i'd seen it in the Great Brain series. Tom was always sleeping on problems and he'd have the solution in the morning..
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
In one of his books one character says "do you know what I like to do when I am facing a problem that seems impossible to solve? I go to sleep. In the morning the problem is still there but at least I got a good night of sleep."
Sometimes you just have to step away from the problem for a little bit. Maybe take a little walk, or go grab some coffee. I have been stuck with a programming problem for hours and I have solved it before I even walk out of the building because that temporary distraction of the walk/coffee sort of cleared my thinking.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Now you speak the spirit without knowledge and ask for your spirit without knowledge to provide a solution during the night to you problem. Now let go from all the concern and go to sleep.
:), but it does make one realize how little we still know about the brain function.
Another variation is to sort of think to yourself - 'need to wake up at 7am' and then go to sleep. Strangely enough it works for me two out of three times; eventhough I'm a night person and would normally sleep until 11-12 if undisturbed.
Not very practical because of the failure ratio
3.243F6A8885A308D313
that I keep sleeping on it...
truly the hardest part is getting started.
I wish I could quote a few more pages, it is such immensely interesting writing, and shortly we are introduced to the paradox which ground work on Principia almost to a halt.
A little over a year ago, I was in a linear algebra class that introduced me to vector spaces. I was having a lot of trouble understanding the topic on more than a superficial level. After about a week of serious studying, I had a lucid dream about an abstract vector space. I perceived directly a four-dimensional space. The dream did not have a visual component, but such abstract dreams are not uncommon for me. The best I can describe that dream is to say that I perceived four coordinate axes that were mutually perpendicular. Since that night, both math and dreaming have been more fun for me, and I've had relatively little trouble understanding vector space calculus. (T. D., Clarksville, Tennessee)
I still have to get much better al lucid dreaming before I can do anything remotely complicated, but I do look forward to it.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
Rene Descartes days ended when he took a job as a tutor to the Queen of who like to study philosophy early in the morning. Queen Christina liked to study philosophy early in the morning and would drag Descartes out of bed at 5:00 AM. Like a good philosopher Descartes believed in sleeping past noon. With the new schedule, he caught pneumonia and promptly died.
Bullshit. This is bullshit, unrelated data. Human beings are as individual as snowflakes with as many variables affecting testing outcome as can be imagined. The study [i]may[/i] possible show which people's brains function in a logical, problem-solving fashion whereas the others may not. It may show how many people have the ability to understand mathematics.
It does [b]not[/b] show how many people were affected by sleep any more than how the number of leaves blown into the parking lot of the building the night before affected their testing results.
Bullshit, unrelated data.
I can't go to sleep instantly but when I do I can wake up at a predetermined time. I think that we all have a very accurate internal clock, but you need "program" your mind to use it. It all started when I took up fishing as a hobby. I used to set my alarm clock when I needed to wake up early to go fishing, but I soon found out that I'd always beat the alarm and wake up within one minute of it ringing. I don't use alarm clocks anymore, I just think about what time I need to wake up at just before going to sleep.
The only thing your subconcious has going for it is that it doesn't have to process the terrabytes of data that the outside world hurls at your concious every second.
Your subconscious filters out excess data, so that your consciousness doesn't get overloaded. Raphe Nuclei and the Locus Coerulus in particular.
cause I get 1914141 not 1914419.
People who say they "don't dream" are really just dreaming in deep sleeps and not waking up throughout the night.
I once worked with a very scary woman. Her scaryness wasn't obvious at first. What I learned/noticed, in the order I noticed it:
- She was always a little out-of-step with the rest of the office.
- She claimed to never have had a dream.
- She claimed to have much better memory than anyone she had ever met.
- She recalled lots of things in great detail that no one else in the office recalled at all.
- She would act on these memories, and discount anyone who argued against her.
- The things she remembered were...odd.
- Very odd.
- Very, very, very odd. Involving things like rituals with rubber masks, co-workers dieing and being brought back to life, clients coming to the office on horse back, and people really being strange creatures "wearing" human bodies as costumes.
- She "remembered" things about me that, while flattering in an odd sort of way, were not, shall we say, plausible.
At that point a little voice in my head started saying "Danger Will Robbinson!" and I listened to it. When in Rome and all that...-- MarkusQ
I've been obsessing about something from my distant past for a few weeks now. It's so intensely personal that I'm afraid to burden anyone with it.
I've heard that you are more likely to dream about the last thing you think about at night. I was hoping that dreams could help me work this out, at least gain some perspective and insight.
I'm not remembering the dreams, but I am thinking about it when I wake up in the morning and I feel like the new perspectives are pouring in, helping me to deal with it. I also find odd memories, relating to this, from the past popping up. I think I am dreaming about it, but I'm not remembering them.
I remember reading about an experiment a couple of years ago. A group of people who had never played Tetris before were asked to do so, in a controlled environment, every day for a period of time. The people who had vivid dreams about the game showed a marked improvement where the others did not.
I believe that dreaming is a way of working through our problems and possibly indexing our memories.
Dreams are better as dreams than reality.
= 9J =
66 students is not big enough sample for such conclusion!
We covered a similar topic a few days ago (but not a dupe.)
My entries were:
Dreaming about programming
SUMMARY: I do most of my prgramming while asleep. I get the specs, sleep, work, repeat until release. When I get stuck on an issue, my body wants a nap. When I wake, the answer is there and the code starts flowing from my fingers. If I work on an issue without sleeping first, the code suffers.
Sleep is great for those tough problems
EXCERPT: My concious mind is your typical genius type with ADD-like symptoms. My subconcious regularly comes up with world-changing concepts and finds uses for technology that everybody agrees are impossible.
Your conscious and subconscious minds aren't really different things.
I act as if they are completely separate. My concious mind treats my subconcious as its own personal problem-solving machine. I am able to focus my concious mind to the exclusion of eating and sleeping for days, but it is easier and better to just tell my subconcious what I want, then do something else. Easy stuff, like writing code, can take a few minutes. Harder stuff, like remembering bugs or structural flaws in a 10,000 line program, requires a night's sleep (4 hours for me.) Really difficult stuff, like building a complicated data structure with the tools of a limited language, or discovering a more efficient process for tasks, can take a week. One problem took 2 months before my subconcious told me it was ready with a solution.
I am not saying they are completely separate. The 2nd post details that I can break the wall through sleep deprivation for song-writing. But my treating them as separate entities has increased my productivity. My concious mind does the simple fill-in-the-blank code writing; my subconcious does the difficult work; and my productivity is much greater than when I try to do everything with just my concious mind.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Have you read "When H.A.R.L.I.E was One"? It is a great sci-fi about artifical intelligence.
The relevance was that the AI started having periods of irrationality. It used these periods to make random connections to discover what worked. The techies were busy trying to "fix" this behavior, until one of them (our hero) decided that they were a good thing.
I have not heard of any AI programming that includes periods of random fact-matching to simulate sleep. I do not follow the current technology, so if anybody is aware of AIs that are programmed to have a "dream" process, let us know. If it was deliberately programmed, it would probably be better as a constant background process than as a period of unusability. Hopefully we can improve the process rather than reproduce our own limitations.
And why do we need to sleep to dream? Can we be reprogrammed to do it during the day? Or does it require 100% CPU (brain) utilization so we need to switch levels to handle it, like running a firewall at a level that cannot accept extra input?
Yes, I know sleep restores the body as much as letting the brain go wild. Maybe intelligence was developed from our brains going insane (by animal standards) from lack-of-input during the body's forced periods of rest. Our bigger brain meant more insanity than other animals, which became intelligence when the insanity took control of the concious mind.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
This technique was reasonably popular during my years (early 1990's) at Caltech, which has an earned reputation for overworked undergrads. When stuck on a problem, one would review the content of the problem and consider some general approaches, and then fall asleep. With some practice, this sleep would be immediate and short (30 min). Most of the time, one would wake with a correct sense of how to approach the problem. I have continued to do this since, when I have a lot of math or physics work.
This worked well for mathematics and physics problems when the missing element is which approach to take in solving the problem. Detailed work, like actually doing a proof or derivation, are definitely work for the waking, rational mind, but the choice of an approach is typically more intuitive.
We never knew how this worked. It could have been a semiconscious exploration of the search space, the simple refreshment of a short rest, some distance from the problem that allowed a fresh perspective, or even a placebo. We did not have the resources (esp. time!) to study this effect scientifically. But it did help, and that was our main priority at the time. There may also be other ways to get these benefits; I've heard similar things about meditation, but that's not from personal experience.
Some cautions: if not practiced at short sleeps, or if drastically sleep-deprived, that short sleep could turn into 13 hours; sudden waking seemed to prevent any benefit, so only set an alarm later than the expected waking time; waking can involve a need to scribble down ideas suddenly, so keep a pencil and paper nearby unless you want to re-enact a scene from "Memento".
It is my belief that the human brain is a magnificent pattern detection machine. That is how we, as a species, have evolved to be successful, because our brain can make linear sense out of an otherwise chaotic environment.
But when we learn language, and theories, and skills and stories, our brain gets filled up with all this information which, while extremely useful in obvious ways, also acts to create filters in our minds. The more we learn, the more we think we know, and the more we distrust anything our brain picks up on that we have not consciously learned. It's why children can often be cuttingly insightful and have potential far above what most adults credit them -- they have not yet learned that they are not supposed to understand things yet.
Our brains pick up on many things in this world that, as we grow older and are told things by other people, we learn to ignore. Deja vu... first impressions of other people (including love at first sight)... ghosts... premonitions, or just having a "feeling" about the way something will turn out... resolving complex problems when not even thinking about it... They are all linked, yet we are trained to discard some of them as superstition or bad gas.
We figure things out when we sleep or are otherwise distracted because our conscious mind drops the filters and lets the real hardcore pattern detection machine, our unconscious mind, which has not been and cannot be corrupted by our attempts to consciously control it, send out its results.
For the next week, try really paying attention to your feelings and unexplainable impressions of the events and people in your everyday life, including yourself. (For example, you often know in your gut that you're doing something wrong, but consciously you think it's what you're supposed to do so you will create rational excuses for it; it's how people end up looking stupid on Dr. Phil without having any clue about it beforehand.) You will find that you are a much more intuitive, insightful, and powerful person than you realized, if only you can learn to trust yourself over what you've been taught to believe. It's like tapping into a part of your awareness that you didn't even realize was there.
Poincare found that after intensely studying a problem and then walking away and "forgetting" about it for a while led to new insights about the problem during the "forgetting" period.
... take a break from the problem :) The latent memories of the problem interact with your unrelated activity in the subconsious in novel and unexpected ways that may lead to better insights into the problem.
He recommended that his students take breaks to go think about something else entirely.
For a more in-depth analysis of this idea I would recommend reading Jacques Hadamard's "The Psychology of Invention in the
Mathematical Field"
The next time you suffer from a block and you just can't get anywhere
When I was a child, and needed to stick to our 24-hour-day for school and such, I needed less than 4 hours each night.
When I was addicted to caffeine (late teenager into adulthood), my pattern was sleeping about 2 of each 24 hours, plus a 12-20 hour crash every 2 weeks. This helped with (or was required by) college and 2 jobs.
Since giving up caffeine, my sleep patterns are completely random. Some days I sleep every fourth hour, other times (usually when programming a large but simple project) I am awake for over 24 hours, then sleep for up to 8 hours. I ocassionally have weeks where I only sleep twice, each is about 14 hours.
I think my body requires about 56 hours of sleep every fortnight. It does not care about the pattern, just the total quantity over 2 weeks. This holds whenever I am healthy. Illness or other pain drastically increases the sleep requirement until it is resolved.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Also he said (again IIRC) that to turn off his conscious brain and let his subconscious work he'd watch a brainless action movie.
5 and funny? I didn't seen anything humorous about it. So the guy wakes up to the sunrise HAHAHAH LOL SO FUNNY.
Sex helps me solve problems ..... but then I usually go to sleep after sex.
... rules the jungle without fear.
After reading the blurb, I am more interested in the calculation than the "sleeping on it" solution.. Furthermore, if you can do something in 7 steps, or sleep for for X time, then get up, discover a single step and do it. seems like it might be faster just to do the 7 steps, but whatever.
"The results are amazing!" said one scientist on condition of anonymitiy. "Who would have thought there was so much truth in one common expression?"
Heartened by their success, other research labs are exploring whether you can "lead a horse to water but can't make him drink," and whether there is truly "more than one way to skin a cat."
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
We were shown the string HIJKLMNO, and told that there was an interesting way to summarize it. Our instructor told us to sleep on it, and the next day about half the class came in and said that it was "water".
HIJKLMNO = the letters H to O -> H2O -> water.
Weird.
I have even read (what I believe to be) original poetry in dreams, which is expecially interesting considering that I usually do not enjoy reading poetry, nor am I a poet.
In all these instances, I am amazed at the clarity of the text and the message itself.
The Philosophy of Liberty | lewrockwell.com
I was failing all my classes in school, so I decided to sleep through them, grades shot up imediatly.:)
I read the article this morning and decided to take a nap before replying...
- - - - I just woke up and this is all I could come up with to say ?!
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
You're assuming the brain is a computer. We have a tendency to picture everything working how we are comfortable with, which clouds the vision of the true reality.
I wouldn't bet on it. If you compare clock cycles in the brain to a computer, the computer is faster. Supposedly extreme parallellism should fix this, but how many firing neurons constitutes a "thought"? How DO the brain process all the data (all nervous impulses, all dreams, visions, Everything we are)?
Research into spirituality suggests that the mind is outside our body, and the body / brain a big radio receiver. With an uneducated guess, I would support this idea enough to warrant more research into it.
Figuratively, you could even regard it as, I don't know, maybe the death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, and chief nourisher in life's feast.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
When you're working on a problem you come across a lot of wrong solutions and tend to get hung up on them. It's not until you get off work, go to sleep or whatever that you let them go and your mind is free to consider other options.
I recently had a problem with A* knotting up in spots before continuing along the path. It was suggested I see where the path crosses itself and work from there. There's actually an easier solution. Instead of assuming the next node is the next step, you look for the node farthest down the line from it who's distance is within the per node limit and ignore everything in between. You basically take all the shortcuts.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Think one thing. Think it well.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Speaking of the subconscious, while it's helped occasionally for some tough homework problems, it also reminded me one night that I had a paper due the next day.
It was one of those lovely dreams that involved being naked in class... I was in english class, except that it was taught by one of my electrical engineering professors, and he was telling us that we had a paper due "November 18." It was also incredibly hot in the classroom, so I ended up taking most of my clothes off, to the amusement of the class.
Later that "day," I was back in my dorm room, which resembled a typical department front office, so anyone could come by and say hello. "I heard you were naked in English class today!" they said. Lacking anything better to say, I simply replied proudly, "Why yes, I was!"
The alarm then woke me up, I rolled to the side of the bed and looked in the floor (where I kept most of my papers). Sure enough, I had a paper due in Engineering Orientation on November 18, which happened to be that very day. Umm, thank you, subconscious.
I've always found particularly appealing a hypothesis that Francis Crick proposed quite a few years back. His idea was that while you are asleep, a random stimulus generator in your brain is stimulating different regions of your cortex, and then damping down any circuits that resonate. So when you wake up, all of the unproductive ideas that were perseverating about before you went to sleep are suppressed, and you now can come up with new ideas. The nice thing about the idea is that it even explains why you can't remember your dreams--they are the stuff that your brain is trying to forget!
Back in the 80's Dr Morton Shatzman (a London psychologist/doctor) did a series of articles in New Scientist on this. In the first he talked about it then posed a number of puzzles and asked readers to sleep on it and if they solved them then to write in. Subsequent articles docuemnted the responses.
I recall three of the problems.
The first asked how do you make four equilateral triangles with 6 matches. Someone had a dream where they walked past a weatherboard building and ran their hand down it and all the wood fell off the side into a pile that made a triangular pyramid (the answer).
The second was a rather gruesome sentence of about ten words - I only recall the word "slaughter". You were meant to solve this (though no problem was stated). Someone reported a dream where she had the sentence on a piece of paper and knocked on a door and gave the paper to the man who answered. He read the sentence then laughed so hard his head fell off (literally). The next morning the woman couln't work out what this meant until many hours later when she realised if you took the first letter of every word in the sentence it made a humorous pun. (an example of our unconscious having trouble communicating with our conscious minds and only able to do so through metaphores)
The third was "What fraction between 0.5 and 1.0, when inverted is still between 0.5 and 1.0 This had me stumped (as all the others did). I went to bed and dreamt of two people having sex (typical teenage dream!) Then the next day I was baffled as to if that had anything to do with the problem then realised the people in the dream were 69ing and the answer came to me immediately: 6/9! Write it on a price of paper and turn it upside down ("inverted") and it's still 6/9. I wrote in and this was indeed the correct answer.
Interesting stuff.
pithy comment
the main distinction [is] that you are pestering it constantly rather than checking on it rarely.
I might be the one who checks my unconcious rarely so it has time to find a solution. I stay out of its way until it says "OK. Ready. Got time to use this thing?"
OTOH, my concious mind keeps a stream of thought going at all times, so maybe I am "pestering it constantly" when awake, and I use sleep to give my subconcious the quiet it needs to work. That would agree with your: If you're asleep, that part of your mind has nothing better to do than work on whatever incomplete tasks it has from when you were awake. I have great difficulty with activities that require blanking the mind, such as doing meditation or watching TV. Those activities slow my mind until I act almost like a normal person. This fits in your theory.
I am not certain my concious mind is actively involved when writing code. I often refer to it as "flowing from my fingertips." I can carry conversations while my fingers are typing. I regularly multi-task anyway, but I do not even feel involved in the programming process. I rarely "go to the whiteboard." It helps that my applications rarely need other programmers, and when they are involved, their portions are defined by APIs. Either those APIs are part of the specs I am given, or we do not write those APIs until we can see the code (written by my subconcious) and decide how the other parts should interface.
the conscious mind generally takes all the credit
I let managers/clients know that I need to let my subconcious work on a problem. My regular clients will tell me specs before they are needed (which seems rare when reading about the Dibert-esque world.) One of them commented that the quality rises dramatically when I work at home (where I typically take frequent naps rather than fighting to get my conscious mind to deliver solutions during office hours.) Of course they only [want to] pay me based on the number of hours my concious mind is engaged with their work.
My sig "I spend my life entertaining my brain" came from the realization that my subconcious makes many demands. I must write code to make it happy. I must write songs to make it happy. I must write books to make it happy. If I want to go running, I need to bring a book (and trying to read while jogging is not easy) or at least give it music to dissect. My concious mind would be happy eating, sleeping, and practicing reproduction, but my unconcious keeps driving me to do all these creative tasks.
the unconscious mind does all the work, and the conscious mind is a manager.
That is what I was attempting to state. Maybe the wall between them is extra thick for me. Or maybe I have stopped trying to use my concious mind for these I know my unconcious mind is better suited. That delegation would be good management if we were two people. And my last paragraph suggests that my subconcious is often the boss.
I try not to explore this too much. There is the chance that if I understood it, it would stop working (and I enjoy the money my subconcious makes.) There is also the chance that I would be classified insane and locked up.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Yet another personal experience.
I had to give a presentation on a SAT reduction problem. I read the paper that I was having trouble with before going to bed one night (much to the annoyance of my girlfriend), and gave up on trying to understand it. The next day when I gave the paper a shot again, it read like a Dan Brown novel. By the time the presentation came around I knew enough to bluff that I didn't know nearly enough about the subject to be an expert.
The middle mind speaks!
You're going to have to define your terms better. If "subconscious" include all brain activity not involved with immediate attention, it certainly is superior. Everything stored in your memory is "subconscious." As a matter of fact, your "subconscious" includes breathing, and all the sensory data that you're not bringing attention to, your movements, muscle action while walking. Your point is also diluted by your inability to spell subconscious, but this is Slashot, so your post is "insightful"
I need Mozilla to add the ability to use "Word Definition" search at dictionary.com, preferably without losing the "Web Search" with google.
I tried to research "simulated annealing". I have not seen so many words that I did not know on one page in a long time. The last time I even saw 2 words I did not know, they turned out to have been just-invented marketing buzzwords. This probably means I am not experiencing enough new bodies of knowledge. Thank you for expanding my mind.
Anyway, "simulated annealing" seems to mean slowing things down until they reach a stable form. (Please correct me.)
Dreaming is about creating new information by randomly connecting existing information. Any new information that proves valid becomes part of the datastore. That information can now be connected to every other piece of information, so there is MORE work to be done, so the system is less stable. (Define stability as the portion of connections that have been checked.)
I am assuming (in the scientific sense) that each data has a score for Accuracy. If it is known False, then Accuracy is 0. If known True, then Accuracy is 100. Some data might be set to "Known Fact", so its accuracy would not be changed by the process. Our model is for every data to be checked against all other data.
(Please excuse the example. I wrote this quickly.)
Start with data that includes:
1. Men like women.
2. Women like men.
3. Ellen is a woman's name.
4. Ellen DeGeneres is a woman. (Known Fact)
5. Ellen DeGeneres likes women. (Known Fact)
A connection between #3 and #4 would increase the accuracy of #3. A connection between #4 and #5 would decrease the accuracy of #2. The system would be able to request new input to clarify data about specific objects:
Input: My name is Ellen.
Query: Do you think Mike is cute?
Input: He is not my type.
Query: What is your type?
(I am assuming that any machine that interacts with humans would learn tact quickly or be unplugged.)
The programming for a learning machine that can check new input against all existing data would be very complicated, which is why people who do AI programming tend to do only AI, and the rest of us avoid the area.
There could be a point when all input was processed and the system was stable. So "simulated annealing" could describe that process. But new input must cease, or the system must be fast enough that each input is assimilated before another arrives. A time of "sleep" would stop the input.
Both systems are mentioned in "When H.A.R.L.I.E was One". The periods of irrationality (sleep, dreaming) were needed to correlate the data until that point. Later when HARLIE had enough "proven facts", it could correlate new input in real-time. The book also assumes major breakthroughs in computer technology so HARLIE is really fast.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
In October of 2003, the oldest person in the world died at 116 years of age. This BBC article discusses that one of the things she did was to stay awake for 2 days, and then sleep for 2 days. I don't know if this is any indication of her ability to live long, but it's interesting nonetheless.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Edison use to sleep in his roll top deak for 20 minutes at a time.
Do you remember the Sienfeld episode where Kramer decides to sleep in shifts of two hours, this was inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci (and is supposedly a true story not something Jerry came up with)As most people know not only was he an artist, Da Vinci was also one of History's most proficient inventors. Maybe this was due to his sleeping habits more so than the fact he was a genius.
Doesn't this just prove that your thinking sucks when you've been deprived of eight hours of sleep? Or did the researchers get students to nap for eight straight hours of daylight?
Weren't there stories of the famous inventor just getting up and leaving his lab and going to the movies whenever a particularly hard problem had him stumped, and coming back later with the answer?
He accredited it to letting go of the conscious thought required to "think" about the problem and letting the brain continue working on it subconsciously while he focused 100% on the entertainment of the movie.
I would say this is more of a key to the reason than the sleep itself. When you're asleep, your brain continues doing whatever it does to solve problems, but your conscious self and all your preconceived notions of how to handle the problem are no longer in the way, so to speak.
+++OK ATH
Interesting article in Newsweek this week as well regarding sleep habits and its impact on logic processing (in the human brain, not in a CPU).
They had it first.. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 94591
I'm a perfectionist but I'm trying to cut back.