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Beat Your Insomnia And Become More Creative!

By Gustaf Eriksson

Republish: EasyPublish™
Published: 23Dec2009
Word count: 580
Viewed: 429 time(s)

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Why is a good nights sleep so important? The most obvious effect if you sleep badly is that your mood and concentration is affected.

This is very clearly seen in children who sleep too little - they get cranky, unpleasant and find it hard to concentrate. Adults can partly compensate for this, since we are able to reason and because we have larger mental “reserves”.

However, there is another aspect which is often overlooked when sleep is discussed. That is the importance of sleep in our ability to learn new things. Research involving MRI scans, where you actually “see” what happens in the brain, has shed light on how learning is processed. It seems to work like this - facts, skills and ideas that you acquire during the day are processed when you sleep and is transferred to the long-term memory store.

And furthermore, there appears to be a difference between learning academic tasks and practical tasks. Practical tasks are things like learning to walk or to ride a bike. That kind of learning is processed mostly during REM sleep, when it is firmly embedded in the memory store.

Young children do a lot of practical learning - think of a toddler learning to walk - so that might well be a main reason why the younger the child the more REM sleep it has. Babies and toddlers need lots of small naps to consolidate all the stuff they learn. As you grow older you more and more have to learn “academic” things, stuff that involves concentration and factual learning - think of all the subjects in school.

This kind of learning seems to be consolidated mostly in slow-wave sleep. There have been numerous experiments - and you can probably recall from your own experience - showing that if you “sleep on it” you are more likely to remember what you have been studying. And not only that, but the less sleep you have the less “smart” you become!

The obvious example here is what happens in the military when soldiers are forced to operate without sleep. The longer they go without sleep their ability to make the right decision gets worse.

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!

Possibly the most celebrated example of this “subconscious processing” is the discovery of how the benzene molecule is shaped.

A chemist named Friedrich Kekule could not figure out how the newly discovered molecule of benzene was put together. He knew it consisted of six carbon and six hydrogen atoms, but the knowledge of the times did not allow these 12 atoms to fit together. 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 other’s tails.

Waking up he immediately realised that the molecule was like a bracelet, with the six carbon atoms having alternating bonds, and the hydrogen atoms “hanging” on to the carbon atoms. This was utterly unlike anything thought of at the time!

What happened? Kekule had all the facts but could not make sense of them. Placing them in his subconscious his mind went to work, and “processed” the information in a dream.

You may not have revolutionary insights like Kekule, but you will definitely be more creative if you pay attention to your sleeping habits!

I am a health professional, who has also suffered from insomnia. Having found a method that works for me, I now have a website and a newsletter that will help you to cure your insomnia!

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