Problem solving in sleep
In a nation where most people burn the candle at both ends, sleep is a precious and increasingly scarce commodity.
But what if there is more to sleep than just rest?
What if we actually learn while snoozing?
Would that motivate you to put sleep higher on your priority list?
Although most of us already know that sleep is the time when our bodies and brains replenish, giving us the resources we need to get through the challenges of the day ahead, most of us are quick to move it to the bottom of our swelling to-do lists.
The Stages of Sleep
To better understand here's a quick refresher on how sleep works.
Sleep has two major phases: rapid-eye-movement (REM) and non-rapid-eye-movement (NREM). We begin sleep in the NREM phase, which itself has four stages: Stage 1 (onset), Stage 2 (light sleep), Stages 3 and 4 (deep sleep). After approximately 60 to 90 minutes, most people enter REM sleep, which lasts about 20 to 30 minutes, after which NREM sleep returns and a new sleep cycle begins.
During a normal night's sleep, healthy adults experience between four to six consecutive sleep cycles.
Although NREM and REM sleep are both critical for our health and functioning, they are very different in nature. During NREM sleep, the body can move, but eye movements are typically absent.
Breathing slows. Heart rate, blood pressure, and blood flow to the brain decreases, and EEGs show a slowing of the brain's activity.
In contrast, REM sleep is characterized by physical immobility, rapid eye movement, increased blood flow to the brain, swings in blood pressure, heart rate, and respiratory rate, and spiking on EEGs. Although dreams occur most commonly during REM sleep, they sometimes occur in the early stages of NREM sleep.
Inspired by the concept of neural optimization in sleep, years ago, I developed my own formula for problem solving, which works for me each time I need a solution to a complex task marred by excess contradictory information.
Sleep makes a half of the solution! This is the formula:
1. Get good sleep: sleeping in the right phase and without any artificial control is vital!
2. Think about the problem: how can I solve it? What information can help solve it? This step requires 100% isolation from the outside world. It works great in nature or when just pacing a room up and down.
3. Read about the problem until my brain sizzles. With incremental reading, it can really take an hour or two to load the working memory up to its capacity, and push the brain to exhaustion. Again, this step requires minimum interruption to ensure 100% focus on the problem. Not a single brain cell should be absorbed with the conflicts of the world. All resources must go into problem solving.
4. Exercise: to stimulate circulation, to provide time for lazy unstructured thinking, and to fill the time before the next opportune sleep episode, I exercise. I know many people who solve problems successfully without ever exercising. So this might be just my personal optional favourite. I think it is important to keep the brain pure in its focus on the problem. I "pollute" the mind with irrelevant information only in cases of a major lockup, or mental block, where the solution to the problem is particularly elusive.
5. Go back to Step 1, only to discover that the previous round pushed my thinking by a country mile, and that sleep portion was essential for being able to see the big picture. Napping is great as it counts as much in the cycle as night-time sleep does.
Pity we have been designed to nap only once per day. Perhaps multiple napping would provide for more creative steps forward per day (if it was feasible).
For difficult problems, time is an ally! The more think-learn-sleep cycles you can run, the closer you can get to the target.
Keeping the mind pure is vital, but taking occasional breaks for unrelated information processing can unclog prejudiced pathways in the brain.
During the exploratory activity in waking, the associative networks of the brain (incl. the hippocampus) integrate information from various portions of the cortex with new information coming from various highly-processed sensory inputs.
Cortical processing is responsible for the working memory and thinking, while the associative networks hold patterns of recent activity.
During waking, cortical networks get overloaded with potentiated connections, while the hippocampus gets overloaded with new associative patterns.
In NREM sleep, cortical processing is inhibited, the cortex is globally de potentiated and hippocampal patterns are used to integrate newly acquired information with previously stored cortical long-term memories.
REM sleep is used to train the hippocampal network with new patterns garnered from the cortex in a process that can be likened to a "simulated waking". Those new patterns are then transferred back to the neocortex in the successive NREM episode. NREM-REM interplay is used to remould knowledge away from detail-rich patterns towards generalized patterns.
This interplay, which repeats several times in the course of the night, is what makes us smart.
This interplay helps us use little information for maximum effect. Frequently used patterns get reinforced in the cortex by gradually building their synaptic stability, while the synaptic retrievability spontaneously decays in a negatively exponential manner to maximize the utility of memories and minimize the cost of storage
Disclaimer: The information on this POST is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional advice. The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. All content, including text, graphics, images and information, contained on or available through this article is for general information purposes / educational purposes only, and to ensue discussion or debate.
Thank you …How do we know if we are dreaming or awake?
Did you ever wonder if something you remembered really happened, you imagined it, or dreamt it?
The difference between fantasy, dreams, and reality is not as clear-cut as we might think.
How do we distinguish dreams from waking life?
Want to add word or two?
Dreams are differentiated from other psychological experiences because they occur when we sleep. One of the most distinctive aspects of dreams is that people believe them to be true and real as they are dreaming.
While dreaming, we believe the dream is really happening to us, no matter how bizarre or illogical the experience in the dream may seem once we regain consciousness.
Your comment ….?`
We think we know when we are awake and when we are asleep, when we are dreaming and when we are not, but it is actually not so clear.
Many people experience moments of confusion and uncertainty, waking up yet still feeling like the dream was real.
Some people complain of terrible and unremitting insomnia, but sleep studies suggest that while they believe they are awake, they are actually asleep, dreaming that they are lying in bed, tossing and turning for hours at a time. They wake up convinced that they had not slept at all.
Memory and reality
Just as we believe our dreams are real as we are dreaming them, we also believe our memories are real as well. It is not so clear.
What we think of as a memory is more like a dream than a video recording. Although many people believe they have excellent memories and recall things just as they happened, it is never so easy or straightforward.
We know more than we are aware of consciously. What is under the surface emerges from our dreams and memories.
In psychoanalysis, we use these experiences to help make meaning in people’s lives.
Don't just treat your memories and daydreams as random firings in the brain, but reflect and imagine what you are trying to tell yourself.
Something to sleep on?
When you combine these benefits with the well-known benefits that a good night's sleep has on our physical health, productivity, performance, and overall mental state, it should serve as a motivator to steal as much sleep as we can.
But for many, getting good sleep can present a challenge ... even when we have time for it.