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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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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...
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?
--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor?
American Weblog in London
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.
....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
However, you believe we should discount a published study of 60 people with anecdotes from a very small number of people?
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); }
"I've been working for five days without any sleep to finish this report. At first I had a mental block. But on the fourth day I was visited by an Incan monkey god who told me what to write. Now I just have to find somebody who can translate his simple but beautiful language."
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
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.
Comparing two population proportions:
n1=n2=30
p1 = 0.6
p2 = 0.22
Null Hypothesis: Population proportions equal
Pooled proption = 0.41; standard deviation = sqrt(0.41 * 0.59) = 0.49
Z statistic = (p1-p2) / (sigma * sqrt(1/n1+1/n2)) =2.99
p-value = 0.0014.
That seems pretty significant to me. Go to the top of the class, and jump off.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
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'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.
Also, when you've just written it, you tend to read things as you meant them, not as they're actually written. When you put it down, do something else (sleep, play sports, whatever) and then come back, you're no longer reading it directly from the page/screen rather than partially from memory.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I have also played some excellent games of Tetris in my sleep, but that doesn't seem nearly as interesting.
Lasers Controlled Games!
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.
Just run xsleep as a background task.
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
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.
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!
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.
"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 hardly got more than 4 hours a night
I can recommend marijuana. This miracle-drug meant I rarely had any trouble sleeping in past midday when at university.
Registering accounts later than some other chrisb since 1997
that I keep sleeping on it...
truly the hardest part is getting started.
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.
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.
The input number is 11449494.
1 and 1 are the same, yields 1. (first two digits)
1 and 4 are different, yields 9. (first result with next digit)
9 and 4 -> 1
1 and 9 -> 4
4 and 4 -> 4
4 and 9 -> 1
1 and 4 -> 9 finished!
A simple counter-example to the pattern is 14141414, which yields the results 9449119.
Clearly the final result (9) is not the same as the second result (4).
main(O){10<putchar((O--,102-((O&4)*16| (31&60>>5*(O&3)))))&&main(2+ O);}
LN2 is cool!
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.
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
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.