Why Sleeping on a Problem Helps

People who are having trouble solving a problem or learning new information are often told to sleep on it. This turns out to be great advice. While your body is resting, your brain is busy laying the foundation for learning, memory, and creativity.

Sleeping to Learn

One leading researcher in this area is psychologist Jessica Payne at the University of Notre Dame. Payne headed up a recent study in which participants studied pairs of words at either 9 a.m. or 9 p.m. The participants’ recall of the words was then tested between 30 minutes and 24 hours later. Those who slept soon after learning the words remembered them better than those who didn’t sleep for several hours afterward.

The implication is that reviewing for a test or rehearsing a speech one last time before bed might help you remember the information the next day. But there’s a caveat: Other studies have shown that people need to sleep for at least six hours to see any improvement in learning, and eight hours might be even better.

If you wait until the last minute to cram for a test or prep for a presentation, you might stay up so late or feel so stressed that you don’t get a good night’s sleep. That could actually hurt your performance the next day. So reviewing the material one last time before bed may help, but burning the midnight oil can backfire.

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Creative Snoozing

Sleep not only strengthens memories in the brain. Research indicates that it also helps the brain reorganize and restructure those memories in ways that could lead to creative insights. This may explain why so many artists and scientists have claimed that they got some of their best ideas while asleep. For example, Paul McCartney has said that the tune for his Beatles song “Yesterday” came to him in a dream.

Research has generally backed up the idea that sleep promotes creative problem solving. In a study from the University of California at San Diego, researchers assessed creativity using something called the Remote Associates Test. For this test, participants were shown groups of three words (for example, cookie, heart, sixteen) and asked to think of a fourth word that could be associated with all three (for example, sweet).

Participants were tested in the morning and again later in the day after a nap with REM sleep, a nap without REM sleep, or a quiet rest period. REM is the stage of sleep during which dreaming occurs. The REM group improved over their morning performance on the creativity test, but the other groups did not. The researchers speculated that changes in neurotransmitter systems during REM might underlie the improvements.

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Building the Brain

On a physiological level, scientists are still exploring how sleep sets the stage for learning, memory, and problem solving. However, it’s believed that crucial pathways of brain cells may be formed or strengthened during sleep.

In addition, sleep may be necessary for the pathways to work efficiently. This could be the reason that lack of sleep is so detrimental to healthy brain functioning. Studies have linked inadequate sleep to slowed down thinking, impaired concentration, faulty decision-making, and slower reaction times.  The bottom line: It’s smart to catch some zzzs.

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