

The brain can get a lot done, and leave you a little smarter, when it sleeps - peakok
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-snoozing-makes-you-smarter&print=true

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henryw
Great article, this is the type of interesting stuff that keeps me coming
back. The author suggests an interesting hypothesis in the end:

"Memory processing seems to be the only function of sleep that actually
requires an organism to truly sleep--that is, to become unaware of its
surroundings and stop processing incoming sensory signals. This unconscious
cognition appears to demand the same brain resources used for processing
incoming signals when awake. The brain, therefore, might have to shut off
external inputs to get this job done. In contrast, although other functions
such as immune system regulation might be more readily performed when an
organism is inactive, there does not seem to be any reason why the organism
would need to lose awareness. Thus, it may be these other functions that have
been added to take advantage of the sleep that had already evolved for
memory."

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pmorici
Is this really that surprising to people? Many of the solutions to the
problems I think about during the day come to me right as I fall asleep.

It's always just been a given for me.

~~~
mechanical_fish
This isn't about the time "right as you fall asleep". If it were, it would fit
just fine with various earlier theories of sleep: the ones that concluded that
sleep was just an extreme form of rest, a chance to let all those overworked
neurons cool down and heal, and that you could get most of the benefits of
sleep by, say, meditating.

But the new data is beginning to home in on what _sleep_ accomplishes. And, in
fact, your brain is doing a lot of work while you sleep. If I were to indulge
in some CS-freshman handwaving, I'd say that the sleeping brain is doing
garbage collection, lossy compression, and search indexing and optimization.

Is that surprising? I'd say that the really surprising thing is that we've
gone through life up to now without really having any data on what sleep is
for. So the new theory that sleep is primarily about memory management is more
gratifying than surprising. It's about time we figured this out!

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kirse
I think it's surprising that we still can't figure out the purpose of an
observable process that blows a third (or more) of our lives, yet somehow
we've come to a definitive theory on how the entire universe came into
existence.

I guess the more we know, the more we realize we don't know.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I know folks who work on neural imaging. Let me assure you that to call sleep
"an observable process" is a _big_ exaggeration. Stars are _much_ easier to
observe than the details of your brain at work. Indeed, the reactions which
drive stars are easier to see, understand, and simulate than _a single neuron_
is.

It's not the size or the distance -- it's the complexity. I'm not saying that
astrophysics is easy, but it's a lot less complex than the brain. Your brain
is the most complicated thing in the universe... as far as we know.

~~~
eru
It is just a matter of what you mean by understanding a thing. There are
different standards applied to brains and stars.

A lot of things that count as understanding in stars are just normal to know
about brains - for example mass, density, mechanical properties, energy
throughput, age.

That "Human brains are the most complex thing in the universe"-meme strikes me
as human chauvinism.

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bloch
Piotr Wozniak (inventor of SuperMemory) wrote about this eight years ago:
<http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm>

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allenbrunson
_Sometimes when you return to a problem after a rest, you find your
unconscious mind has left an answer waiting for you._

<http://www.paulgraham.com/head.html>

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babul
Powernapping achieves much of the same (atleast for me). So if for some reason
you are unable to take sleep, at least be sure to try and fit in a ~20min
powernap. The benefits can be surprising.

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brentr
I've experienced this effect numerous times. Sleep is a wonderful thing. One
time in high school I was working on an advanced calculus problem for several
hours before going to sleep. I woke up in the middle of the night to use the
restroom and realized that suddenly I had the key insight needed to find the
solution. The problem was to find the solution to \int_{0}^{\infty} t^{-
\frac{1}{2}} e^{-t} dt.

If only this worked all the time. Perhaps I should read up on the Riemann
Hypothesis and see what happens tonight.

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VinzO
Sometimes we need years of studies to (re)discover what our elders knew long
ago. That's probably from where comes the proverb : Night is the mother of
counsel.

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icky
Finally, I can have that useless lump of pinkish-grey jelly work for _me!_

