A GOOD night鈥檚 sleep could give you the answer you鈥檝e been looking for, reports Ullrich Wagner鈥檚 team at the University of L眉beck in Germany.
The researchers asked 66 volunteers to solve a series of maths problems using two simple rules. What they were not told was that there was a short cut that made it very easy to obtain the answers. After three trial runs, the volunteers were allowed an eight-hour break before continuing with the task. Of those who slept during the break, more than twice as many discovered the short cut compared with those who stayed awake (Nature, vol 427, p 352).
During sleep, we subconsciously sift through recent memories, which may throw up answers to problems we faced during the day, Wagner suggests. 鈥淲e think the strongest explanation is that sleep acts on the patterns created during training, restructuring them to give insights to the hidden rule.鈥� Wagner thinks the best way to ensure a problem is 鈥渄ealt with鈥� during sleep might be to mull it over just before bedtime.
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The team decided to investigate the phenomenon after reading many anecdotes about people waking with the solution to their problems. The Russian chemist Dmitri Mendelyev, for instance, said he devised the periodic table after he had a dream where all the elements fell down into the right positions.