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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 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!
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.
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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 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
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...
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.
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?
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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
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.
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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); }
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.
Let me see if I get this straight.
Sixty people in a controlled study is not enough to be 'meaningful'.
Yet a bunch of anecdotes coming from you and some of your coworkers is significant? Bizarre.
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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.
On work days i tend to sleep 5 to 7 hours but i compensate on weekend sleeping from 10 to 14 hours... don't know if it is the normal.
I also read somewhere that oversleeping at weekend does not entirely compensate the lack of sleep trough the all week. Don't have a clue really, all i know is that by the end of the week it get's harder to concentrate.
rm -rf /home/leia
I have also played some excellent games of Tetris in my sleep, but that doesn't seem nearly as interesting.
Lasers Controlled Games!
You've been modded funny, but there's more truth in your jest then the mods might've realized.
I'm sure most people realize it's very difficult to remember most dreams. People who say they "don't dream" are really just dreaming in deep sleeps and not waking up throughout the night. However, if you're startled awake for some reason (whether by the dream or external factors) during or shortly after a dream, your odds of remembering it shoot way up. Hence the advice to keep a notepad by the bed to write things down if you want to recall your dreams. I don't see why this wouldn't extend to dreams that may help solve problems.
One other thing I remember a professor telling us - If you're faced with a difficult problem of some sort, go do something else for awhile. Your brain will continue working out the solution while you do something else (sort of like './programming_problem &' I suppose with optimization for background processes). I do that at work all the time. I don't know if it would be more effective than sleep, but if I'm faced with a tough programming problem, I'll hit Slashdot or go take a walk. I recall working for hours upon hours once on a tough nested data structure for a custom search system. Finally, in total frustration, I got up and stormed out of the cube, went and sat in my car, and turned on a CD. After 15 or 20 minutes, I got up, came back in, sat down, and Hallelujah! I banged out the data structure and supporting code in about 20 minutes more. A few optimizations and tweaks later, and I was done. No clue where it came from. Wasn't thinking about it consciously in the car, but apparently the ol' brain was still churning and took advantage of the lack of stress from overfocus.
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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'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.
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.
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.
True Story. I was stuck on a bug during my undergraduate work. In the middle of the night, my girlfriend tells me, I jumped out of bed, clicked away on the keyboard and climbed back in bed. The next morning, I found the solution to my problem, albeit ill-typed, on my screen.
After this occurred, I decided to look into it. Experts suggest purposely thinking of a tough problem *right* before you fall asleep. Your subconsious is a) much smarter than you conscious and b) never stops working. Giving it a job to do will result it working on it all night. Try it. If you remember your dreams, the results are cool.
This is why mental breaks, as the parent mentioned, work. Let your subconscious do the hard work. It's much better at it than your slow, cloudy, easily distracted, conscious thought. Another example, have you ever forgot something important, and then out of the blue while doing something else you remember? Your SC was working on the job the whole time. Ultra-cool, IMHO.
Holy s-, it's Jesus!
Yes. I do this all the time. In fact, most tasks can background process independently.. which means if you are working on three (or more) hard problems at once they all tend to background process and if they are related they tend to compliment each other too. Just be careful with this because you will need more sleep. As much as 4 hours more in my experience depending on how how many problems and how long your worke don them etc...
When I'm programming and I get seriously stuck, I just go for a walk or start some other problem. Non sense banging your head against a wall. It does make filling in time sheets really hard though..
Yeah, I know I worked 24 hours on the project. I billed you for my sleeping time too.. and that walk I took..
That just doesn't work for most clients...
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.
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.