Problem solving in sleep

Question

Often i get solution to a problem I am stuck or even new idea while sleeping... Has anyone else experienced that too or there is something terribly wrong with me. :)

Answer 1

Yes the brain is still active while you sleep.
If you think about some problem that you think of before you go to sleep you might find the solution in the morning.

Answer 2

No this is quite common. Although it is no justification to sleep on the job.

During rest, the brain background processes continue to work. And give a notification if the answer is found.

An other familiar example is: you are talking with friends about somebody, but none can remember the name. And a few hours/days later the name suddenly pops up in you brain.

Answer 3

This is quite typical. When awake brain is loaded with termendous volumes of information and can't process everything fast enough. When sleeping it processes fetched information. If it finds a solution to a problem that is very important to you it can even wake you up.

This can be used for more efficient studying for example. Instead of sleeping for 8 hours you can break the day into two 12-hours halves and sleep for 4 hours in each. This can increase the amount of material you will memorize. You will need strong motivation and a loud alarm clock for this to work. Should be only done once in a while - can possibly cause severe neural disorders if you live this way for prolonged periods.

Answer 4

It's quite normal to think of new ideas or solutions in your sleep.

The most famous example I can think of is Paul McCartney composing the melody for Yesterday in his sleep:

According to biographers of McCartney and The Beatles, McCartney composed the entire melody in a dream one night in his room at the Wimpole Street home of his then girlfriend Jane Asher and her family. Upon waking, he hurried to a piano and played the tune to avoid letting it slip into the recesses of his mind.

So you should keep a notepad next to your bed, so you don't forget your ideas in the morning.

And a piano :)

Answer 5

I don't solve programming problems successfully in my sleep. But I do have a lot of dreams where I am solving my life's issues through a database schema. It's very funny to wake up and realize I spent the night trying to sanctify my marriage through a new attempt at data normalization enforced with referential integrity.

Answer 6

I once went to bed faced with a severe design error in my code, already having written thousands of lines of code. I woke up the next morning, sat down and wrote a procedure that fixed the problem cleanly and efficiently, but I wasn't really aware of how the code worked as I wrote it. It was a very strange experience.

Answer 7

"I'll sleep on it" isn't just an empty cliché.

If I think about a task for a few minutes a couple of weeks before I intend to start the task, I can then leave my brain to process it in a background thread - it often wakes me at 2am with great ideas! By the time I actually start thinking about the design consciously I already have a pretty good idea of what I want to do.

Hint: Any ideas that occur at 2am must be written down, or they will be gone by the morning!