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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."
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); }
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.
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.
Not using as much energy when asleep and rebuilding muscle and other tissue are probably also a factors, but perhaps orthogonal ones. It is imaginable that there could exist a lifeform which would rest (and thus save energy, rebuild) without putting its mind in a sleeping state.
Saving energy cannot possibly be the whole reason, because in that case you could compensate for lack of sleep by eating more, and you can to a point but after 48 hours or so of waking time you usually notice that it's not so much the lack of energy but the lack of ability to concentrate. So intuitively it would seem that the mind needs to do something that demands it to be in "sleep-mode".
Pity you are such a poor student and have such poor time management skills -- otherwise you'd get your sleep, and be a more efficient (and less crabby) person.
Actually, more like keep a copy for next time when said boss thinks that 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week, actually brings anything except stress and lowered quality.
More to the point, I don't know if some subconscious process during the sleep is really what helped those students there, or just the fact that:
- group A was well rested when they went back at it, while
- group B was ploughing ahead, after being already tired of 8 hours at it. (I.e., being every idiot PHB's ideal workers.)
After a point, fatigue simply lowers the returns more and more.
Now I'd be even more interested to know what were to happen if group B did 12 hours shifts over 6 months or a year. See how eventually they'd start making mistakes like 1+1=3 when calculating those numbers. See how more and more time goes into going back and fixing those mistakes, than in making any actual progress.
Of course, the truly clueless PHB still wouldn't notice. If you're working for a clueless PHB, he'll tend to see only the "hey, cool, I'm getting 50% to 110% more hours out of them" part. But conveniently not notice the "but they between 300% and 500% more time to debug the code they wrote while being tired and stressed."
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Interestingly, Scientific American had an article on sleep a few months ago that suggested both REM and non-REM sleep were essental to various brain functions. Trying to force yourself into REM-only sleep might not be such a wise idea as you would only be regenerating half of the necessary brain chemestry in the long run.
I read the internet for the articles.
Your subconcious is not much smarter than your concious. Your concious is not "slow", "cloudy", or any more "easily distracted" than your subconcious is. If you think that your subcon isn't easily distracted, think about when your dreams have gone from somewhat sensical to utterly non-sensical in one bewildering instant.
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. So yeah, you have a few spare cycles you wouldn't otherwise have. But don't mistake it for "superiority".
"UNIX" is never having to say you're sorry.
that I keep sleeping on it...
truly the hardest part is getting started.
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.
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.
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.
They're mammals. Try sleeping in water without drowning and the reason for evolving that particular trait might start to become more clear.