An Active, Purposeful Machine That Comes Out at Night to Play (Sleep)

New York Times ^ | 23 October 2007 | By BENEDICT CAREY

[shrinkermd]

In a study published in May, researchers at Harvard and McGill Universities reported that participants who slept after playing this game scored significantly higher on a retest than those who did not sleep. While asleep they apparently figured out what they didn’t while awake...

“We think what’s happening during sleep is that you open the aperture of memory and are able to see this bigger picture,” said the study’s senior author, Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist who is now at the University of California, Berkeley. He added that many such insights occurred “only when you enter this wonder-world of sleep.”

Scientists have been trying to determine why people need sleep for more than 100 years. They have not learned much more than what every new parent quickly finds out: sleep loss makes you more reckless, more emotionally fragile, less able to concentrate and almost certainly more vulnerable to infection. They know, too, that some people get by on as few as three hours a night, even less, and that there are hearty souls who have stayed up for more than week without significant health problems.

Now, a small group of neuroscientists is arguing that at least one vital function of sleep is bound up with learning and memory. A cascade of new findings, in animals and humans, suggest that sleep plays a critical role in flagging and storing important memories, both intellectual and physical, and perhaps in seeing subtle connections that were invisible during waking — a new way to solve a math or Easter egg problem, even an unseen pattern causing stress in a marriage.

The theory is controversial, and some scientists insist that it’s still far from clear whether the sleeping brain can do anything with memories that the waking brain doesn’t also do, in moments of quiet contemplation.

[shrinkermd]

When faced with a tough decision my mother would tell me "sleep on it." I thought this ridiculous at the time. No longer.

[Red Badger]

I thought this thread was gonna be about vibrators.....

[The_Reader_David]

An awful lot of mathematicians, myself included, have had the experience of working very hard to find a proof, going to sleep still feeling clueless about the what the right approach is, and waking up knowing the solution.

[Jigajog]

I don’t know if I buy it. I’ll have to sleep on it and see what I think tomorrow. Funny how scientist are able to confirm common sense.

[meowmeow]

I keep a big book of Sudoku puzzles next to my bed. I've found that doing a couple puzzles before I go to sleep helps me relax because I have to concentrate enought that I stop thinking about all the other stuff of the day. My theory was that while I might lay there restlessly mulling over the house renovation, work stuff, family stuff, there's no way I can lay there and mull over a Sudoku puzzle.

However, I've also found that when I get totally stuck on a hard puzzle and just put the book down, turn off the light and go to sleep, that the next day if I pick up that same puzzle, I will suddenly just whip out all the answers. It's kind of weird - I always wonder, how could I not see that solution last night...

[Mygirlsmom]

Back in the stone age, we used to have to memorize poems and such in school. Sometimes they were quite long. I used to go over it one or two times just before turning in and in the morning could recite perfectly.

[kitkat]

***Funny how scientist are able to confirm common sense.***

How could it be that the scientists have to do studies to prove something so simple? Gtants, anybody?

[The_Reader_David]

Thanks for that story. I’ll remember that, since Sudoku puzzles are now the ‘hymn tunes of mathematics’ as Hardy once called chess puzzles: a large portion of the general populace now amuse themselves by finding existence and uniqueness proofs. (I chuckled the first time I read ‘no math is required’ in the instructions to a Sudoku puzzle.) Now I have a basis for suggesting that non-mathematicians can and do have the same experience.

The phenomenon isn’t so suprising when ‘sleeping on it’ applied to some life decision—dreams sometimes mirror life so the ‘it came to me in a dream’ phenomenon, even when the dream is forgotten doesn’t seem so odd. But when it’s a matter of pure discursive reason like a mathematical proof (Sudoku puzzles included) is seems very strange.

I’m not sure what the fact that the unconscious mind seems to reason says about things like strong AI, the nature of the mind, or the existence of the soul, but it’s certainly curious to think about.

[pigsmith]

Scientists have been trying to determine why people need sleep for more than 100 years.

Dang. No wonder I'm tired. All this time, I thought eight hours was enough.