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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."
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".
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.
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.