I Can't Sleep - And I Can't Think Properly Either!

You know sleeplessness is bad for you

You know sleeplessness is bad for you. Just look at small children - or teenagers! - that sleep too little, they often find it difficult to function well and to be concentrated.

It is obvious in children who sleep too little - they are moody and irritable. As you grow older you can partly overcome this.

However, there is another aspect which is often overlooked when sleep is discussed. Our ability to learn new things is intimately interwoven with sleep. The way learning is processed in the brain has been investigated using MRI scans. It seems to work like this - during the day you learn new facts and get ideas, as well as acquire new skills, that are put into long-term memory when you sleep.

Also academic and practical tasks are learnt differently. Learning to walk or climb a tree are practical tasks. It appears this kind of learning is consolidated during REM sleep.

Young children do a lot of practical learning - ever seen a small child learning to walk - which explains why young children have more REM sleep. Now you know why small children nap a lot. Growing older means you progress to more "academic" learning - just consider school courses.

Learning of this kind seems to be embedded mainly in slow wave sleep. It is well established - you have certainly experienced this as well - indicating that you are more likely to remember if you "sleep on it". Adding insult to injury, you will be less clever the less you sleep!

A very good example is when soldiers have to stay awake. Sleeplessness does not improve their decision making faculty, rather the opposite.

Add here the ages-old knowledge that very often creative thinking improves when you ponder a problem, setting out all the aspects you can think of - and then forget about it!

In one of the best known instances of this subconscious problem solving the riddle the benzene molecule was untangled.

A German scientist - Friedrich Kekule - was thinking of what the benzene molecule looked like. At the time he could not think of a way the 12 atoms could be joined. This was in 1865.

Whilst he was pondering the problem he dozed off in front of the fire, and in his sleep he saw two serpents catching each others tails.

When he woke up he saw the structure in his mind - the carbon atoms were joined in a ring ,and the hydrogen atoms were "dangling" from the carbon atoms. At the time this was completely new!

What happened? Friedrich Kekule could not consciously put the facts together. When he put all of the data in his subconscious - like entering them in a computer program - his mental "computer" started to work the problem through.

Maybe you won't have moments as crucial as Kekule, but you will certainly be more creative if you sleep better!

by: Gustaf Eriksson

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