
Your brain makes decisions while you sleep - Libertatea
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/09/17/your-brain-actually-makes-decisions-while-you-sleep/
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leoedin
There's been a few times in my life when I've heard a sound while sleeping
that my brain decided "wasn't right" and woke me up. Often the sound is very
quiet - perhaps a mouse in my bedroom or an event outside the house. Generally
there's a very bizarre process where I'll sort of wake up and then "hear" the
sound, allowing me to process it consciously. It's obvious that I wasn't awake
when the sound happened, but that there's some sort of constantly running
sound-comparator listening to the world and triggering alerts when something
that isn't easily matched to the known is heard.

The similarities with FPGAs/ASICs are really quite interesting.

~~~
Someone1234
Light too. A DirecTv box with super-bright blue LEDs (don't get me started)
decided to turn itself on randomly in the middle of the night, and that
definitely woke me up from a deep sleep (maybe my brain thought it was a
fire?).

Now, granted, we do fall in and out of stages of deep and less-deep sleep
throughout the night, however in my experience I have definitely been woken
out of deep sleep by an usual sound or light (although it seems like it takes
less from a less-deep sleep to wake you).

~~~
vidarh
> super-bright blue LEDs (don't get me started)

I bought a package of 400 small black sticky "dots" for the sole purpose of
conquering bright blue leds... (Search for "sticky dots" on Amazon)

~~~
dpatrick86
Thank you!!!!!! Grrrrrr..... Nail polish failed me miserably.

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petercooper
This is quite a specific test, but I often get creeped out by how well
"sleeping on it" works. I don't even have to actively think many hards problem
(in my usual problem domain, naturally) but a day or two later a solution will
appear in a flash. This annoys some people, because they'll ask "how shall we
do X?" and I'll want it to sit and compost for a few days as I know the
solution will be better than something forced!

~~~
__david__
Oh me too. I've often the real smart person in my life was my subconscious.
Like you said though, the downside is there is no progress reporting and it
can take a really long time. But I would say many of the slick solutions to
programming problems have come from my subconscious, either after sleeping or
just taking a break and eating some food or something.

~~~
bostonpete
> I've often the real smart person in my life was my subconscious.

I think you accidentally a word. Your subconscious must not have written that
sentence... :-)

~~~
__david__
Or my silly new phone keyboard I was testing :-). But yes, "I've often
thought" or "I've often felt" is probably what I meant.

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pacofvf
"sleep on it" now makes more sense, in Spanish we have something similar
"consúltalo con la almohada", which loosely means "ask your pillow about it"

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atom-morgan
Has anyone here spent any time in a sensory deprivation tank? After going in
one myself, the conclusion here makes a lot of sense.

While you're floating, you don't feel like you're actively processing
everything that's going on around you as you do in a normal environment where
all senses are available to you. While floating, it feels like you're
spectating your mind as it processes things.

So when you shut off all your senses and let go, you enter this observation
mode where information is being processed but it doesn't feel like _you_ are
doing it. It seems like the same thing is happening while we sleep only we're
not as lucid.

I'm interested to see if others have had similar experiences.

~~~
bentcorner
In (I think) a slightly related topic, I sometimes listen to white noise when
sleeping on the bus. I've noticed that I'll hear voices as I drift off to
sleep - they sort of coalesce from the static and as I start focusing on the
voices they disappear. I think it's my brain trying to make sense of the
input, and as I start going to sleep the "reigns go free".

Sort of eerie. (No, I don't hear voices when I'm not listening to white
noise).

~~~
hrjet
This happens to me with the sound of running water even when I am fully awake,
especially when I am expecting an important sound. For example, if I am in the
shower and expecting an important call on the phone, I often get a feeling
that the phone is ringing. But it's just my brain trying to be super alert and
picking up noise as signals. If I turn off the water, the sounds go off.

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virmundi
I'm presently reading a book called Psycho-Cybernetics. It's rather old. I got
it for free from an estate sale. Looked interesting because it has Psycho and
Cybernetics in it; where could I go wrong?!

The main thesis is that the subconscious is a machine for doing things. Like a
machine, it only reacts to data. It makes no judgement calls on the data. The
goal of a person is to use their conscious mind to filter the information the
doing machine gets. It was one of the first cognitive behavioral therapy
books.

The book advocates sleeping on it for the reason given. The mind will process
the data and come to a conclusion. The trick is to managing the data to get a
good conclusion.

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edw519
I discovered this by accident years ago, and now "sleeping on it" is
absolutely essential to my making progress, in fact it's probably my most
important work hack.

I started off by decoupling programming from analysis, doing each at a
different time in a different place. This led to doing analysis at bed time. I
may not have figured things out that night, but invariably, elegant solutions
"came to me" in the next day or two.

I have talked about this many times here. My earliest comment:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191275](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191275)

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snippyhollow
Thomas is a labmate of mine, fire away if you have specific questions, either
I can answer them, or ask him!

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batrat
Isn't the same study?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8306849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8306849)
(6 days ago)

~~~
sdk16420
yes, both link to this paper:

Kouider, S., Andrillon, T., Barbosa, L. S., Goupil, L., & Bekinschtein, T. A.
(2014). Inducing Task-Relevant Responses to Speech in the Sleeping Brain.
Current Biology.

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123testaccount
Years ago, for a period of about 3 months, 2 friends and I would get together
after work and play an XBOX fighting game for 4-5 hours (We had literally
nothing else to do. No money, no cable, just this one game). Winner plays
again and loser waits his turn.

Everyone's style and character picks would constantly evolve during this
process. But generally, one friend would lose far more than he would win, and
we would tease him mercilessly, as you do.

One day, out of nowhere, he was unbeatable. Winning game after game, to all of
our amazement.

My other friend, who I don't think graduated high school and almost certainly
never read anything about sleep science or brain development, made the
following comment, which struck me as profound at the time:

"JP was dreaming this shit last light. No doubt, dreaming it all night"

Another example of sub/unconscious learning happens in sports. Another pastime
of mine is playing pickup basketball.

One of the best ways to get into a hot shooters head is to simply say "You're
shooting really well today. What are you doing differently?" the same applies
to things like a golf swing.

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bambax
I sometimes stay conscious while asleep.

The first time it happened I thought I was dead, because I felt completely
conscious but could not control my body nor receive input from my senses. I
kind of panicked, and with what felt like an extreme effort was able to become
fully awake.

Since then it happens from time to time (I can't make it happen) and it's a
very pleasant experience since you're in a dreamy state where you can pretty
much decide what you dream about.

It's a state that is between awake and asleep; when in that state, it's very
easy to fall into actual sleep (to lose consciousness), and very difficult
(but possible) to awaken completely.

I keep good memory of the experience each time.

I would like to talk about it with people who experienced the same thing, but
could never find anyone just by talking about it to friends around me. Where
should I look? Does this thing have a name?

~~~
bambax
Thanks for all the rapid responses!

The Wikipedia page about Sleep paralysis make it sound like something horrible
where you're attacked by monsters that you can't escape because you don't
control your body.

I actually enjoy it when it happens (and would like it to happen more often!)
but apart from that it seems that, yes, that's what it is, so thanks.

Lucid dreaming (at least according to Wikipedia) is something different -- a
brief lapse of consciousness inside a dream. That happens to me also, quite
frequently, but is quite a different experience. When I dream about unpleasant
things I often begin to think "meh, this isn't real, it's probably a dream",
and the dream takes another direction -- but not one that I control. I
wouldn't say I'm fully conscious then; it's more that my dreaming self is
aware he's in a dream.

~~~
scrollaway
I enjoy and dread sleep paralysis at the same time in a very odd way. When my
sleep schedule gets _extremely_ messed up and/or I'm extremely stressed, sleep
paralysis can resurface which makes it a sign that I'm not currently healthy.
At the same time though I understand what you are saying. It's an extremely
unique and harmless experence and gets the juices flowing so to say.

I gotta say though, the first time it happened (I must have been 12 years
old), I thought that was it. I thought I'd never move again. I hope the world
can educate children and bring more awareness to what sleep paralysis is. It's
an extremely stressful and unusual experience and one you would not be able to
recognize unless you knew about it beforehand. God knows how many "I've been
abducted by aliens" lunatics have actually just experienced that.

So if you have kids, take 10 minutes to tell them about it.

~~~
bambax
Good point; I was maybe 30 the first time it happened to me and didn't think I
was paralyzed -- I thought I was dead, and it was kind of interesting in some
way: "so that's how it's like to be dead; not what I had imagined!" but also
frightening of course.

You're right it happens more often when I'm super tired.

About telling my kids, I don't know. Kids have a way of taking everything you
say very seriously, and growing it in their head like it's an Important Thing
(which is good and bad at the same time). Why bother them with something they
may never experience?

It's so much more important to teach them how not ti be run over by a car!!!
and something I have to repeat every. single. minute. (They don't generalize;
they know they shouldn't cross the street without looking when we're walking
to school; but during weekends if they drop something they'll run after it in
the middle of the street like it's a totally different situation. But I
digress).

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rubiquity
Rich Hickey's Hammock Driven-Development[0] talk is a good talk about how
getting away from the computer, and sometimes even sleeping, can be the best
way to solve technical problems.

0 -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc)

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olalonde
Anecdote: I once came up with a joke in my dream and laughed so hard at it
that it woke me up (and my girlfriend). I also sometimes speak in English in
my dreams although it's not my native language. There's also several stories
of famous writers and scientists who had their "haha" moments while sleeping
(James Cameron claims the idea behind Terminator came in a dream).

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xmmx
Wasn't there a movie by Christopher Nolan about this same concept?

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dang
This is a dupe of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8306849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8306849).

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treehau5
Article seemed to make a quantum leap here

> But most importantly, our work revives that age-old fantasy of learning
> during our sleep

Can someone elaborate on how responding to preconditioned stimuli (a voice
repeating the same question over and over) can translate to learning things
while we are asleep?

~~~
PeterWhittaker
My guess - and it is nothing more - is that there may be a possibility of
learning procedural tasks, making them more and more automatic, provided that
one begins the procedural task prior to falling asleep, as in this experiment.

As noted in the article, brain centers associated with attention are
deactivated during sleep, so the possibility of acquiring semantic or episodic
knowledge seems remote, as does the possibility of acquiring procedural
knowledge without the "start it just before falling asleep" condition.

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nitid_name
Fast forward to the point where we're able to utilize this sleeping brain
function to some level of usefulness. I wonder how this sort of sleep-work
will affect the quality of one's sleep and their cognitive functioning in the
long term.

~~~
Terr_
The dystopian-cyberpunk perspective would say that it'll be a new kind of
sweatshop, with poorer people slowly burning out, selling their sleeping hours
as the lowest form of labor.

Alternately, we might find that certain people are very good at certain tasks,
and it'll be a more like trade guilds.

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RyanOD
When I was studying piano as a child, my instructor required me to practice
the song I was working on just before going to bed and again when I woke up.

I always assumed this helped my brain solidify the mechanics of the song.

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malka
Could this be linked to the Tetris effect[0] ?

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect)

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linguafranca
Only slightly related, but I often solve hard(ish) programming problems while
I'm in that state between asleep and awake throughout the night. Take that,
cliche!

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lukeholder
Is there any research to suggest you can learn while sleep by listening to
audio recordings? I have heard about it before but thought it was quackery?

~~~
PeterWhittaker
As noted in the article, brain centers associated with attention are
deactivated during sleep, so acquisition of semantic knowledge seems unlikely,
as you suggest.

The experiment's novel condition was to begin a procedural task before sleep
then continue the task as subjects fell asleep and slept, monitoring them the
whole time.

Cf my other comment in this thread.

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Chris_O_75
My brain needs to decide to keep sleeping, and help me out with my damn
insomnia.

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tim_jones
Very interesting article. Why do I only dream in the morning?

~~~
anoncow
As you get more rest, REM cycles increase. We recall the dreams we see in REM.

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ExpiredLink
I hope my brain tells me about its decision after I awake.

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jessmoure
very interesting.. Napoleon Hill once said that he came up with the title of
his global best seller "Think and Grow Rich" while he was asleep.

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hasenj
> At the end of the experiment and after they woke up, participants had no
> memory of the words they heard during their sleep, though they recalled the
> words heard while they were awake very well. So not only did they process
> complex information while being completely asleep, but they did it
> unconsciously

I think that even while awake, the decision making happens first
unconsciously, then it gets brought into our consciousness.

You think that you are thinking about it, but actually you're just waiting for
your subconscious to arrive at the answer and tell it to you.

~~~
emilsedgh
"you've already made the choice. Now you have to understand it." \-- The
Oracle

Edit: If that's true, its freaks me out. Maybe our intelligence is overrated
if we make our decisions while unconscious. In other words, if I'm making
choices while unconscious, are my knowledge, belief, moral compass, etc
involved?

~~~
hasenj
Sure they are. The decision process is so complicated, if you were aware of
every step in the algorithm, it'd be slow as hell!

