Sleep on It: How Snoozing Makes You Smarter

[one...two...tree 2,762]

During slumber, our brain engages in data analysis, from strengthening memories to solving problems

By Robert Stickgold and Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen

Key Concepts

• As we snooze, our brain is busily processing the information we have learned during the day.
• Sleep makes memories stronger, and it even appears to weed out irrelevant details and background information so that only the important pieces remain.
• Our brain also works during slumber to find hidden relations among memories and to solve problems we were working on while awake.

In 1865 Friedrich August Kekulé woke up from a strange dream: he imagined a snake forming a circle and biting its own tail. Like many organic chemists of the time, Kekulé had been working feverishly to describe the true chemical structure of benzene, a problem that continually eluded understanding. But Kekulé's dream of a snake swallowing its tail, so the story goes, helped him to accurately realize that benzene's structure formed a ring. This insight paved the way for a new understanding of organic chemistry and earned Kekulé a title of nobility in Germany.

Although most of us have not been ennobled, there is something undeniably familiar about Kekulé's problem-solving method. Whether deciding to go to a particular college, accept a challenging job offer or propose to a future spouse, "sleeping on it" seems to provide the clarity we need to piece together life's puzzles. But how does slumber present us with answers?

The latest research suggests that while we are peacefully asleep our brain is busily processing the day's information. It combs through recently formed memories, stabilizing, copying and filing them, so that they will be more useful the next day. A night of sleep can make memories resistant to interference from other information and allow us to recall them for use more effectively the next morning. And sleep not only strengthens memories, it also lets the brain sift through newly formed memories, possibly even identifying what is worth keeping and selectively maintaining or enhancing these aspects of a memory. When a picture contains both emotional and unemotional elements, sleep can save the important emotional parts and let the less relevant background drift away. It can analyze collections of memories to discover relations among them or identify the gist of a memory while the unnecessary details fade—perhaps even helping us find the meaning in what we have learned.

Not Merely Resting

If you find this news surprising, you are not alone. Until the mid-1950s, scientists generally assumed that the brain was shut down while we snoozed. Although German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus had evidence in 1885 that sleep protects simple memories from decay, for decades researchers attributed the effect to a passive protection against interference. We forget things, they argued, because all the new information coming in pushes out the existing memories. But because there is nothing coming in while we get shut-eye, we simply do not forget as much.

Then, in 1953, the late physiologists Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman of the University of Chicago discovered the rich variations in brain activity during sleep, and scientists realized they had been missing something important. Aserinsky and Kleitman found that our sleep follows a 90-minute cycle, in and out of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. During REM sleep, our brain waves—the oscillating electromagnetic signals that result from large-scale brain activity—look similar to those produced while we are awake. And in subsequent decades, the late Mircea Steriade of Laval University in Quebec and other neuroscientists discovered that individual collections of neurons were independently firing in between these REM phases, during periods known as slow-wave sleep, when large populations of brain cells fire synchronously in a steady rhythm of one to four beats each second. So it became clear that the sleeping brain was not merely "resting," either in REM sleep or in slow-wave sleep. Sleep was doing something different. Something active.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-sn...kes-you-smarter

[Jenn! 918]

Darn it, I thought this meant snoozing as in pressing the snooze button on your alarm.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Darn it, I thought this meant snoozing as in pressing the snooze button on your alarm.

[HAL 9000 96]

I time my snooze button to kick the alarm back 90 minutes after first disturbing my slumber. Hence my habits are in line with Aserinsky and Kleitman.

[almaty 19]

sleeping is good for the mind

[Mononoke28 135]

Darn it, I thought this meant snoozing as in pressing the snooze button on your alarm.

If that were the case, I'd be a freaking genius!

Diana

[panamania79 2]

Darn it, I thought this meant snoozing as in pressing the snooze button on your alarm.

If that were the case, I'd be a freaking genius!

Diana

Me too.

And all this time,I thought it was beer that made people smarter,it made Bud wiser.

[Niels Bohr 72]

MIT students are put into rough case studies assignments on new cutting edge research. They must absorb at the level that is 10000x more than a typical student. Most are suicidal. Why, because they lack sleep. Trying to meet deadlines, parties, extracurricular, etc...

I think stress has something to do with absorbtion. When I'm hooked on something new like manipulating DNA using DNA polymerase, helicase (enzyme) to unwind the double helix, etc...I don't sleep. It's an addiction.

Even though I'm an Electrical and Computer Engineer (Proud to be a member of IEEE), I like biotechnology as well. Sometimes I sit down, and play with aerobic E.Coli bacteria manipulating its plasmid (equivalent to chromatin) and inserting a glow in the dark gene inside my frankenstein laboratory. It's part of my playground with experiments on artificial DNA for conducting electricity.

Edited August 8, 2008 by consolemaster

[HAL 9000 96]

MIT students are put into rough case studies assignments on new cutting edge research. They must absorb at the level that is 10000x more than a typical student. Most are suicidal. Why, because they lack sleep. Trying to meet deadlines, parties, extracurricular, etc...

I think stress has something to do with absorbtion. When I'm hooked on something new like manipulating DNA using DNA polymerase, helicase (enzyme) to unwind the double helix, etc...I don't sleep. It's an addiction.

Even though I'm an Electrical and Computer Engineer (Proud to be a member of IEEE), I like biotechnology as well. Sometimes I sit down, and play with aerobic E.Coli bacteria manipulating its plasmid (equivalent to chromatin) and inserting a glow in the dark gene inside my frankenstein laboratory. It's part of my playground with experiments on artificial DNA for conducting electricity.

Expect a visit from the FBI soon.

FYI- I don't bother with plasmids. Too low a gene delivery efficiency for most of my transfections and I don't like to use lipofectamine. I prefer retrograde transporters like pseudorabies virus or simple adenoviral vectors.

[Mags 112]

Sometimes I sit down, and play with aerobic E.Coli bacteria manipulating its plasmid (equivalent to chromatin) and inserting a glow in the dark gene inside my frankenstein laboratory. It's part of my playground with experiments on artificial DNA for conducting electricity.

I like to watch Lost.

Edited August 8, 2008 by Magenta

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

sleeping rules

[Nagishkaw 510]

I hardly sleep. Does this mean Im stoopid?

[Ban Hammer 13,352]

I like to watch Lost.

so that's why you're always voting me "off the island"

[Jenn! 918]

Sometimes I sit down, and play with aerobic E.Coli bacteria manipulating its plasmid (equivalent to chromatin) and inserting a glow in the dark gene inside my frankenstein laboratory. It's part of my playground with experiments on artificial DNA for conducting electricity.

I like to watch Lost.

[eric&gen 0]

What in the heck is sleep? I usually if lucky 5 straight hours a night.