'Just Sleep On It' Solves Tricky Problems? 527
An anonymous reader writes "CBC news reports that the effectiveness of 'sleeping on it' when faced with a difficult task may have more than just anecdotal roots. 66 students were trained to perform a calculation on an eight digit number using two simple rules which would take seven steps to complete. A different method existed to perform the same calculation 'almost instantly', but was not shown to the students. After eight hours, where half the students were allowed to sleep and the other half remained awake, 60% of the rested and 22% of the wakeful students discovered the more efficient method."
This is good news (Score:5, Funny)
Telling the boss (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Telling the boss (Score:5, Funny)
It's True (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's True (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's True (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's True (Score:5, Interesting)
You've been modded funny, but there's more truth in your jest then the mods might've realized.
I'm sure most people realize it's very difficult to remember most dreams. People who say they "don't dream" are really just dreaming in deep sleeps and not waking up throughout the night. However, if you're startled awake for some reason (whether by the dream or external factors) during or shortly after a dream, your odds of remembering it shoot way up. Hence the advice to keep a notepad by the bed to write things down if you want to recall your dreams. I don't see why this wouldn't extend to dreams that may help solve problems.
One other thing I remember a professor telling us - If you're faced with a difficult problem of some sort, go do something else for awhile. Your brain will continue working out the solution while you do something else (sort of like './programming_problem &' I suppose with optimization for background processes). I do that at work all the time. I don't know if it would be more effective than sleep, but if I'm faced with a tough programming problem, I'll hit Slashdot or go take a walk. I recall working for hours upon hours once on a tough nested data structure for a custom search system. Finally, in total frustration, I got up and stormed out of the cube, went and sat in my car, and turned on a CD. After 15 or 20 minutes, I got up, came back in, sat down, and Hallelujah! I banged out the data structure and supporting code in about 20 minutes more. A few optimizations and tweaks later, and I was done. No clue where it came from. Wasn't thinking about it consciously in the car, but apparently the ol' brain was still churning and took advantage of the lack of stress from overfocus.
Re:It's True (Score:5, Interesting)
After this occurred, I decided to look into it. Experts suggest purposely thinking of a tough problem *right* before you fall asleep. Your subconsious is a) much smarter than you conscious and b) never stops working. Giving it a job to do will result it working on it all night. Try it. If you remember your dreams, the results are cool.
This is why mental breaks, as the parent mentioned, work. Let your subconscious do the hard work. It's much better at it than your slow, cloudy, easily distracted, conscious thought. Another example, have you ever forgot something important, and then out of the blue while doing something else you remember? Your SC was working on the job the whole time. Ultra-cool, IMHO.
Re:It's True (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing your subconcious has going for it is that it doesn't have to process the terrabytes of data that the outside world hurls at your concious every second. So yeah, you have a few spare cycles you wouldn't otherwise have. But don't mistake it for "superiority".
Re:It's True (Score:3)
That sounds almost exactly backwards.
The subconscious processes enormous amounts of data, but in its own time and on its own terms. Occasionally it will dump a bit of stuff into the conscious. The subconscious isn't exactly smarter. It's more that the subconscious can try out all sorts of connections without concern for consequences. As for n
Re:It's True (Score:3, Interesting)
When I'm programming and I get seriously stuck, I just go for a walk or star
Re:It's True (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, I was faced with a tough PHP problem so I hit slashdot. That was 6 months ago and I am still hitting F5 on the homepage. Damn you slashdot!
Re:It's True (Score:4, Informative)
If you stay in the exact position you were sleeping in, and slowly transition from sleeping to waking, you can often remember details more clearly.
Or, you can arrange to be startled awake. Supposedly Salvador Dali would hold a spoon in his hand while dozing off, and the spoon would drop and wake him up just after falling asleep (and entering REM) and thus inspired his paintings of melting clocks (and spoons).
Re:It's True (Score:4, Funny)
Prediction (Score:3, Funny)
internalizing (Score:2, Insightful)
Well established (Score:5, Interesting)
There must be an evolutionary advantage to having a time when nothing else was going on to do something, and what else apart from the days events could occupy a brain if it has no external sensory input... I seriously doubt all the higher life-forms on the planet would do it if there wasn't a good reason....
Simon
Simon
Re:Well established (Score:2)
I've read it before, quite a few times I'm sure, and yes in NS and Sciam too. What I suspect is that, perhaps, sleep is the time when parts of our minds can solve problems without the biases we have w
Re:Well established (Score:3, Funny)
It is well established. I honestly don't know who forked over the cash for this study, but this must have been an alternative to a dot-com investment. I think I'm going to start a new career. I'll choose subjects with a well-known outcome and devise a study that proves what everybody already knows. That way, I can collect all kinds of grant money. Anybody with me?
Re:Well established (Score:3, Funny)
If I can get some grant money, I'll do a study to see if anyone would be with you or not. Our preliminary results say about 70% of the people would be, while 20% wouldnt, and 10% would like to thank you for all of the fish.
Re:Well established (Score:2)
Re:Well established (Score:5, Insightful)
Saving energy cannot possibly be the whole reason, because in that case you could compensate for lack of sleep by eating more, and you can to a point but after 48 hours or so of waking time you usually notice that it's not so much the lack of energy but the lack of ability to concentrate. So intuitively it would seem that the mind needs to do something that demands it to be in "sleep-mode".
Re:Well established (Score:5, Interesting)
My CPU can do that too...
Re:Well established (Score:5, Funny)
Humans have that same ability during election years.
Re:Well established (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well established (Score:3, Interesting)
IIRC, going 11 days without sleep tends to kill people, so it's definitely doing things vital to your health.
Re:Well established (Score:5, Interesting)
But with the ability to shut down one piece at a time, they can let sections rebuild without having to shut down the whole thing.
Like keeping a base system on one of my drives, so if one goes down, I can use the other to fix it without having to futz around with disks.
The Great Brain (Score:4, Interesting)
This was a common strategy used by the fictional middle brother in the series of books called "The Great Brain" by JD Fitzgerald. It tracked the deals and schemes of a wily kid in early 1900s Utah, as seen by his awestruck little brother. He'd think on his hardest mental problems just before going to bed, and would usually awake with an inspiration.
I often employ the same strategy, with mixed results, but it's better than not coming up with any ideas at all.
What kind of sleep? (Score:5, Interesting)
And what about induced sleep through alcohol or medication? Could it be beneficial to have the ability to "sleep on demand" to solve a tough problem?
Re:What kind of sleep? (Score:2)
Best idea behind sleep I've heard (Score:3, Interesting)
Artificial Intelligence with Dreams! (Score:3, Insightful)
The relevance was that the AI started having periods of irrationality. It used these periods to make random connections to discover what worked. The techies were busy trying to "fix" this behavior, until one of them (our hero) decided that they were a good thing.
I have not heard of any AI programming that includes periods of random fact-matching to simulate sleep. I do not follow the current technology, so if a
Re:What kind of sleep? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What kind of sleep? (Score:5, Funny)
For a Spanish immersion program, I stayed with a host family in Quito. About 20 miles from the equator. There, there is no dawn or dusk. At 6 AM, broad daylight. At 6 PM, night.
We had to get up early to catch a bus to take us to school. We were supposed to bring an alarm clock, but I didn't. The first day, I thought, "oh well, I'll just wake up tomorrow and see what happens." (There was no jet lag because we were travelling N/S). So, with my east-facing window, the sun woke me up the next morning. I got up, left my room, went in to the kitchen, and checked the clock on the microwave. It said, "6:21".
I never needed an alarm clock during the whole stay. The sun always woke me up at 6:21 or 6:22.
Re:What kind of sleep? (Score:5, Interesting)
Some people have tried sleeping 20-minutes naps every four hours, and nothing else. Basically, by doing this, you trick the brain into getting all its REM sleep done right away instead of spending two hours sinking into it and two hours rising out in the morning. It's called Uberman's sleep schedule [everything2.com] and people who've tried it seem to love it.
I'm hoping to try it myself over Easter.
Re:What kind of sleep? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What kind of sleep? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or to put it very simplistically: the deep sleep phase makes you smarter, the REM phase sleep makes you wiser. Your brain needs both for you to function properly on the longer term.
Re:What kind of sleep? (Score:5, Informative)
Word of advice to anyone thinking about giving the Uberman sleep schedule a chance: check what actual experts think about it first. I recommend sleep researcher Dr. James Maas's book "Power Sleep".
Never take lifestyle advice from some guy who wrote an Everything2 article at face value. Do your research. Dr. Maas has.
Re:What kind of sleep? (Score:5, Interesting)
Only one problem. After 2 weeks I realized my body wasn't keeping up with my brain. Even though I could think through things quickly (which is fine if you have a desk job) my body seemed to be physically deteriorating. So I went back to the "normal" sleep schedule.
Still, I'd recommend this if you ever have a "crunch time", like when an important project is due, or possible for finals week, or something.
Einstein (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Einstein (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Einstein (Score:2)
Re:Einstein (Score:2)
Five. And that's why she was insane.
Re:Einstein (Score:2, Interesting)
On work days i tend to sleep 5 to 7 hours but i compensate on weekend sleeping from 10 to 14 hours... don't know if it is the normal.
I also read somewhere that oversleeping at weekend does not entirely compensate the lack of sleep trough the all week. Don't have a clue really, all i know is that by the end of the week it get's harder to concentrate.
Descartes (Score:3, Funny)
countless times (Score:2)
I can remember doing that more than ever back when I was 13 programming with TurboC++ for my WWIV BBS. These days I use other methods to keep me on track, but I still find it happening.
taking a shower works too (Score:5, Interesting)
I find I solve a lot of bugs in the shower. Or while out buying lunch. Or anywhere that my brain is not engaged in the current task, but where that current task is something other than the bug I'm trying to fix.
It's almost letting your subconscious thought processes work on the problem instead of trying to tackle it directly.
The upshot is that I feel no shame in saying "I'm not going to fix that bug today. I'll fix it tomorrow" when I'm stumped on something. Or a tricky design problem, etc - works for most problem solving situations.
Of course, this is all anecdotal..
~Cederic
Re:taking a shower works too (Score:2)
Re:taking a shower works too (Score:4, Interesting)
Isn't this kind of the basis of Zen? Letting your mind relax and revert to a almost child like state where you are "open" to most anything. They call this "the beginner's mind".
Re:taking a shower works too (Score:4, Funny)
I've requested my company install one in my cubicle.
Good to know (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't this somewhat obvious? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone who has ever crammed all night for a final knows how your brain seems to turn to mush after the test is over from the fatigue of it all.
Who knows, maybe now that it's been scientifically proven, businesses will realize that people are actually more productive when not forced to work ridiculous amounts of mandatory, unpaid overtime.
Re:Isn't this somewhat obvious? (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA. They also tested a group that had slept, but not been exposed to the problem, and none of them solved it. Thinking about it before sleeping gave the best result.
Re:Isn't this somewhat obvious? (Score:2)
They're missing another basic test, which is how many people found the "secret method" when allowed one double-length session of working, ie. without a sleep break between testing sessions.
As far as the article goes as well, Coleridge wrote "Kublai Khan" under the influence of opium - sleep was a fairly minor issue!
Grab.
The story as reported by BBC news (Score:5, Informative)
You wanna know what sucks? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's worse is when you actually do have pencils and paper nearby and you manage to scribble something down at 3 am., it's either illegible or utterly surreal at 8 am.
I had an amazing idea last night! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:You wanna know what sucks? (Score:4, Funny)
When I was in high school, I had a dream that I was in this ancient-looking stone room. There were books all over the room, some piled in stacks and some just strewn about. There was a desk in the far corner, with a bunch of candles on it and a large book in the middle.
Somehow, I knew that this was Merlin's study (I was in my King Arthur/Holy Grail/Knights Templar phase) and that the book held the answers to every question and secret I would ever have. I walked up to the desk and opened the book.
The writing was incredibly blurry; almost like I was trying to read it without glasses. I squinted to try and clarify things, but it only made it worse. Then, I remember thinking "Hey, my eyes are closed! I just need to open them and I'll be able to read it.".
So I opened my eyes and found myself staring at the ceiling of my bedroom.
That was teh suck.
Memory seems to work like this too (Score:5, Interesting)
A couple of friends remarked that this was quite common for them, but I'd never really thought of it before. It seems some dark area of your brain remembers tasks you're trying to achieve, or things you're trying to remember, and sets about working on them in the background, while you get on with something else entirely.
This may be why people often come up with great ideas in the shower or while driving in the car, as their minds were 'set the task' earlier, and finally it's finished. Not too unlike a computer I guess, but certainly cool when you do it yourself. You realize that brain has a lot more tricks up its sleeve than are mentioned in the handbook.
Re:Memory seems to work like this too (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Memory seems to work like this too (Score:2, Funny)
More commonly known as the gray area
Records clerk of the brain (Score:5, Interesting)
If you keep *trying* to remember something, it's like you keep calling the guy back to the counter and otherwise pestering him such that he can't actually do the thing you're asking of him.
But if you're patient and let him work back there, he'll find the answer. Usually.
Alternative title: (Score:3, Interesting)
So... what you are saying is that sleep depravation inhibits problem solving?
--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor? [colingregorypalmer.net]
American Weblog in London [colingregorypalmer.net]
A useful method (Score:4, Interesting)
The method used to sleep actively on top is to slacken by using hypnosis, meditation, progressive relaxation or any other method which you know (a simple manner with the breath deeply several times all as affirming ). Now you speak the spirit without knowledge and ask for your spirit without knowledge to provide a solution during the night to you problem. Now let go from all the concern and go to sleep. It can be not also easy in the beginning to make this but with the practice you can become an expert with it.
Have a paper and a pencil with range of the hand so that you can write your thoughts and solutions with your problem as soon as you awake. Just continue to practise this and each time you have success by solving your problems by the sleep on top you will amplify your self-esteem and will increase the probability of success the next time.
Re:A useful method (Score:3, Interesting)
Famous, yes. But also generally regarded as apocryphal. It probably didn't happen.
Is it not obvious that... (Score:2, Interesting)
I know that if I'm coding, and have been for a while, the old brain does slow down. Normally in those situations, with my alarm set to go off in 4 hours time, I decide to go to sleep. What happens to me is I normally figure out what I was trying to do in those glorious moments when my brain has given up trying to stay in a concious state.
All too often I h
I hate this... (Score:4, Funny)
I am thinking (Score:2, Funny)
Your boss (Score:2, Redundant)
Re:Your boss (Score:3, Insightful)
More to the point, I don't know if some subconscious process during the sleep is really what helped those students there, or just the fact that:
- group A was well rested when they went back at it, while
- group B was ploughing ahead, after being already tired of 8 hours at it. (I.e., being every idiot PHB's ideal workers.)
After a point, fatigue
Yes, this works (Score:5, Interesting)
Most likely it's because the unconcious mind needs space to work, and concentrating on the issue is counter-productive. Someone once wrote a nice article about why it helps to be stupid when you want to play football, because _thinking_ is not what you want to do when you're standing in front of the goal with an open shot.
Similarly in more intellectual challenges, the subconcious mind does a large part of the work but needs to be left alone to do its thing.
There are other ways to get the same effect:
- playing music while working
- going for a brisk walk (not heavy sport, because that tires you out)
- smoking a joint (depends on the person but for many people this does the trick)
- playing a game (solitaire?)
But sleeping is definitely the best way, probably because the brain is designed to do exactly this.
Incidentally, it works for social problems too. Having trouble with a colleague? Sleep on it, they say.
Re:Yes, this works (Score:2, Funny)
Yeah, I was having trouble with this girl in the office, so I slept with her. Worked wonders, let me tell you.
fundementally flawed... (Score:2)
Happens to me in my sleep... (Score:2)
Saw this on CNN yesterday and was able to find many examples of this type of behavior in my friends and family. The theories on memory and its storage while you sleep are really cool, actually.
Time does gently what you can't do by force (Score:4, Interesting)
I also like to let my brain do the same things with problems. You can sweat and fret over some technical or even personal problem, and hack out a solution that seems like it's the best you have (and yet seems inadequate), or you just let it soak for a day or two or even a week. You never force it completely out of your mind, and occasionally bring it back to mull actively, but not too much more than just running your hands over the surface of it. One of those times, you feel a flash of inspiration, or a depth of understanding that wasn't there before, and that's when you close in for the kill. Your mind gets it.
Anyway, that's the best I can do to use words to describe the proess I use to think and act creatively. I have found that my mind works in similar ways with regard to learning new things, such as juggling or a foreign language. I might practice my juggling for a week, and not see much progress, then take a week or two off. When I pick back up, lo, I've made a significant improvement.
Nobel Prizes from the John (Score:2)
I get some of my best ideas when I'm sitting on the can--maybe it's sort of the meditative aspect of just being in a sensory deprivation chamber, staring at tiles for a few minutes.
Coleridge's "dream" was from more than sleeping (Score:2)
I wonder if the example quoted in the article is appropriate. In a note added to a manuscript copy COLERIDGE himself added that the vision was "brought on by two grains of Opium..." [englishromantics.com] I think the key to "stimulating creative thinking" for Coleridge was differ
Personal Experience with Rubic's Cube (Score:2)
.
. From that point, I knew that sleeping on a problem really worke
oh come on. (Score:2)
They didn't even have a control group.
That sucks (Score:2)
I do often wonder how some people are able to get so much accomplished within the same amount of hours I have (and possibly even sleep more)! One example is that I've got a friend who keeps a pretty decent blog going, takes more pictures per day than I do (between 200 and 500), writes and records his own music, is a webmaster for a hospital (his da
Is it really "Just Sleep On it"? (Score:2)
I'm sure we all do it (Score:3, Interesting)
I often delay tough problems at least a day to let my brain work on them, and it works a lot of the time. Just yesterday I was trying to fix a bug with some code and gave up. Sure enough, this morning I had a fairly good idea on how to address the issue.
Some code examples (Score:2)
printf ("Beginning calculation. Please wait.\n");
sleep(20)
printf ("3.141592\n");
I have debugged in my sleep (Score:4, Interesting)
I have also played some excellent games of Tetris in my sleep, but that doesn't seem nearly as interesting.
Re:I have debugged in my sleep (Score:3, Interesting)
I have also played some excellent games of Tetris in my sleep, but that doesn't seem nearly as interesting.
I've run into a number of people now that have said this. Once, I was writing a tetris clone to hone my Tcl/Tk skills and during two weeks of intensive coding (for me), I played tetris in my dreams almost every single night. It really helped my actual Tetris playing too. I achieved high scores that I could have never gotten as a kid and haven't to this day been able me match.
Obligatory link: http:/
Yeah, saw this yesterday... (Score:3, Interesting)
History is dotted with incidents where artists and scientists have awakened to make their most notable contributions after long periods of frustration. For example, that's how Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev established the periodic table of elements and British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote his epic "Kubla Khan."
Coleridge was NOT asleep! (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, no.
Coleridge was in an opium-induced stupor when he got the inspiration for the poem. Here are some sources that back this up (including comments from the poet himself):
You can read about the poem and its origins here [richardhillmusic.co.uk], or you can read original notes on the poem from the author and others who knew him here [virginia.edu]. You can also read the original poem here [virginia.edu].
--Mark
The actual "problem" they "solved". (Score:5, Informative)
Take an 8-digit string formed from the numbers 1, 4, and 9. A series of two-digit comparisons is done. The result of the comparison is the same digit if they are the same, or the "missing" digit if they are different. That is, 1 1 -> 1, while 1 4 -> 9.
Start by comparing the first two digits, and from then on, compare your current result with the next digit in the string. Their example is 11449494, which leads to the results 1, 9, 1, 4, 4, 1, 9. The last result is the final answer.
The trick is that the original strings were "generated in such a way that the ... second [result] coincided with the final solution." People who found this trick were deemed to have gained insight into the pattern.
I think the study is bogus because of this. Sure, some people will notice the pattern, but careful people might choose to carry out the full calculation anyway, just to make sure. Any given string could follow the pattern or not. What they're demonstrating is how easily people can be tricked into finding patterns that may or may not be there. This kind of learning leads to racial profiling --- the result of the easy observation (race) implies the result of the more difficult one (criminality).
Re:Guess i'm one of the stupid ones (Score:3, Informative)
The input number is 11449494.
1 and 1 are the same, yields 1. (first two digits)
1 and 4 are different, yields 9. (first result with next digit)
9 and 4 -> 1
1 and 9 -> 4
4 and 4 -> 4
4 and 9 -> 1
1 and 4 -> 9 finished!
A simple counter-example to the pattern is 14141414, which yields the results 9449119.
Clearly the final result (9) is not the same as the second result (4).
It has to do with Protein synthesis (Score:3, Interesting)
Tetris Experiment (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe that dreaming is a way of working through our problems and possibly indexing our memories.
Dreams are better as dreams than reality.
Yawn... tickety. tickety tickety. tick.. (Score:3, Funny)
I read the article this morning and decided to take a nap before replying...
- - - - I just woke up and this is all I could come up with to say ?!
Re:Rubbish. (Score:3, Insightful)
However, you believe we should discount a published study of 60 people with anecdotes from a very small number of people?
Re:Rubbish. (Score:5, Funny)
"I've been working for five days without any sleep to finish this report. At first I had a mental block. But on the fourth day I was visited by an Incan monkey god who told me what to write. Now I just have to find somebody who can translate his simple but beautiful language."
Fuck it. (Score:4, Funny)
"In the experiments conducted by Wagner and his colleagues, volunteers tackled arithmetic problems and then took twenty minutes to masturbate furiously while being lectured on mathematics. A second group was instructed to fornicate with a set of oversized-novelty-foam-numeral-character figures. Those who reached orgasm were twice as likely to realize that there was a hidden rule that substantially simplified calculations."
So the next time you can't figure out how to solve a problem, just fuck it!
PS: I refuse to cite the source of this quotation.
Re:Rubbish. (Score:2)
Perhaps it won't be the final word on the matter, but given the disparate percentages reported, it certainly lends weight to the conclusion. At the very least, it should encourage studies of a larger sample population.
Besides, you're doubting their conclusion because of your sample size of only a few people on a non-uniform test?
Re:Rubbish. (Score:5, Informative)
Comparing two population proportions:
n1=n2=30
p1 = 0.6
p2 = 0.22
Null Hypothesis: Population proportions equal
Pooled proption = 0.41; standard deviation = sqrt(0.41 * 0.59) = 0.49
Z statistic = (p1-p2) / (sigma * sqrt(1/n1+1/n2)) =2.99
p-value = 0.0014.
That seems pretty significant to me. Go to the top of the class, and jump off.
Re:Rubbish. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sixty people in a controlled study is not enough to be 'meaningful'.
Yet a bunch of anecdotes coming from you and some of your coworkers is significant? Bizarre.
Another example (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:True... (Score:3, Informative)
Also, when you've just written it, you tend to read things as you meant them, not as they're actually written. When you put it down, do something else (sleep, play sports, whatever) and the