Search Here

While sleeping on a textbook may not transport the information therein into your head through some strange process of osmosis, researchers from the University of Lancaster suggest that sleeping on a problem, be it academic or real-world, may actually help you solve it in the morning.

In as study that aimed to prove the theory 'sleeping on it' works better when solving an issue than working on it while awake, researchers took 27 men and 34 women and had them solve them a serious of verbal insight problems that ranged from easy to difficult and were asked to solve them following a period of sleep, time spent awake or with no delay at all. 

They were only asked to do this with problems that they could not previously solve or had gotten wrong.

 Results showed that the group that was made to sleep before reattempting the problems had significantly more success solving difficult problems  than any other group. No differences were noted when researchers re-solved easier problems. 

"We've known for years that sleep has a profound effect on our ability to be creative and find new solutions to problems," said one of the studies authors Padraic Monaghan from the Centre for Research in Human Development and Learning at Lancaster's Department of Psychology." 

"Our study shows that this sleep effect is greatest when the problems facing us are difficult. Sleep appears to help us solve problems by accessing information that is remote to the initial problem, that may not be initially brought to mind. Sleep has been proposed to 'spread activation' to the solution that is initially distant from our first attempts at the problem. The advice stemming from this and related research is to leave a problem aside if you're stuck, and get some sleep if it's a really difficult problem." 

So the next time you are grappling with the answers to a particularly hard homework question or are stressed out about a decision that has to be made on a work project, just breath, relax and take a nap.