The Secret World of Sleep: The Surprising Science of the Mind at Rest (MacSci) by Lewis Penelope A

Author:Lewis, Penelope A. [Lewis, Penelope A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2013-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

Fig. 21 The number reduction task

A related experiment examined the impact of sleep on creativity by asking people to solve word puzzles.3 Three words, for instance, sixteen, heart, and tooth, were shown, and people had to figure out which fourth word linked them all together (in this case, sweet would be a good answer). People were significantly better at coming up with the answers to this type of problem after a 90-minute nap, and this advantage was only apparent in people who got some REM sleep during that nap. Taken in combination with the recursive mathematical task described above, this suggests that sleep may somehow assist in the formation of associations between loosely interrelated concepts, such as the shared pattern in the math problems and the way the word sweet associates with all three cue words (sweet-tooth, sweet-heart, sweet-sixteen).

Even clearer support for the idea that sleep allows this type of integrative thinking comes from studies which search directly for evidence that snoozing plays a role in pulling together loosely related bits of information.4 For instance, people were taught the meanings of a series of Japanese characters, each of which contained a small pictorial component called a radical, which indicated that it belonged to a particular conceptual category. They were then shown a new (unlearned) character, which contained the same radical, and asked to select one of four possible meanings for it (Fig. 22). Finally people were shown the radical in isolation and asked to type its meaning. Because the radicals were never pointed out in the original characters, this task required integration across multiple pieces of information (e.g., the various characters that pertain to a category, such as water) and abstraction of the information which is common to all of them (this particular bit of the character that is shared indicates membership in the category water). People did much better on this complex abstraction task after sleep.

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