Problems with Maths or Science? Try this

        Have you noticed the uncomfortable feeling on a day when you did not have a good night’s sleep? Especially when you take a math or science exam, the brain just does not let you focus. You have read and understood the issues but can’t recall clearly. The solution is somewhere inside your head and is floating just where you can’t see it yet. This could be due to the toxins floating in your brain which do not let you see clearly. These toxins are like poisons which cloud your brain’s critical thinking abilities. During sleep, your brain cells shrink. This creates more space between the brain cell which facilitates the draining out of toxins. Lack of sleep means that these toxins are still floating around and hampering your performance. The National Public Radio in the United States carried a full program on how the brain sweeps itself clean of toxins during sleep in its popular series ‘All Things Considered’ on October 17, 2013.

In fact, lack of sleep not only causes you to perform poorly on tests but impedes your functioning in several ways. These could range from simple headaches and irritation to serious ailments like diabetes. In her 2014 article in the New York Times, Maria Konnikova lists some of the benefits you gain from having a good night’s sleep including better understanding and an enhanced ability to solve complex problems.

One of the ways in which the brain seems to solve these complex problems is that it rehearses the difficult issues it has faced during the day while you are sleeping. It forgets the less important facts and events and seems to strengthen the important areas which are needed to solve the complex jigsaw puzzle you are trying to solve. The neural patterns are strengthened in this way and you find yourself having a marked clarity in the morning provided the brain has had a chance to revamp itself during the night. So even when while you are not consciously thinking about that problem, your brain is working over it silently overnight.

Another way the brain is able to solve your problems overnight is that during sleep the frontal part of the brain called the pre-frontal cortex is almost deactivated. This lets your subconscious brain become active and form deeper interconnections. This allows multiple parts of your brain to coordinate in solving the issue at hand. As Pam Harrison (2014) suggests in the article in Medscape, sleep consolidates not only the memory of motor tasks but also parts of the brain which are important for learning. Therefore, sleep is important in not only learning of new skills but also in deeper learning and understanding of existing skills or issues, which may seem intractable while you are awake. The memory consolidation helps you connect the dots and reach conclusions more easily.

The above research suggests that there is no cause to be disheartened if you can’t seem to understand or solve a complex problem. Nature has provided a mechanism to deal with this issue. Have a good nap and let the subconscious brain do the difficult parts of problem-solving for you. Using sleep in this way will make you a problem solver.