Think I'll sleep on it. Now we know why

[MadScot]

Often in my younger years when I was doing prototyping and later when figuring out problems that surfaced in production I would tell people I'll have the solution tomorrow. The conscious mind would often be too cluttered to deal with things that needed an uninterrupted train of thought. I would figure things out when I slept. A new study explains why.

http://uanews.org/node/17028

Scientists at The University of Arizona have added another piece of the puzzle of how the brain processes memory.

Bruce McNaughton, a professor of psychology and physiology, and his colleague David Euston have shown that, during sleep, the reactivated memories of real-time experiences are processed within the brain at a higher rate of speed. That rate can be as much as six or seven times faster, and what McNaughton calls “thought speed.”

Their results are published in the Nov. 16 issue of the journal Science.

[Newcomer]

Great post. This is so true. I remember when I was younger I was really into cars and I would find myself with problems that I could not figure out after working on the car all day long trying to get it to run and bashing my brain. I would then sleep that night and I would dream of the problem and all the sudden in my dream I would figure out what the problem was. I would wake the next morning and go right to the car and to the source of the problem that I dreamt about and BAM the car would be fixed. This was also the case in my Career with Network File Server errors. I would bash my brain again all day trying to resolve an issue with no resolve and after a night of sleep and dreaming about it I would find the fix in my sleep and the next morning the problem was resolved. I guess sometimes thinking to hard on an issue can cloud the answer that is right in front of you. Wierd how the mind works.