Sleep Reconfigures Memories Into Creative Ideas

Sleep reconfigures memories into creative ideas, it has been found. Sleep is known to consolidate memories, fixing them in the brain so we can retrieve them later.

Now new research shows that sleep also perhaps reorganizes memories, picking out the emotional details and reconfiguring the memories to help you produce new and creative ideas. The findings of Jessica D. Payne of Notre Dame and Elizabeth A. Kensinger of Boston College have been published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

About Sleep Disorder
Sleep disorders can either be having difficulty in getting sleep or dozing off at inappropriate time.

The duo study what happens to memories during sleep, and they have found that a person tends to hang on to the most emotional part of a memory. For example, if someone is shown a scene with an emotional object, such as a wrecked car, in the foreground, they’re more likely to remember the emotional object than, say, the palm trees in the background — particularly if they’re tested after a night of sleep. They have also measured brain activity during sleep and found that regions of the brain involved with emotion and memory consolidation are active.

“In our fast-paced society, one of the first things to go is our sleep,” Payne says. “I think that’s based on a profound misunderstanding that the sleeping brain isn’t doing anything.” The brain is busy. It’s not just consolidating memories, it’s organizing them and picking out the most salient information. She thinks this is what makes it possible for people to come up with creative, new ideas.

Payne has taken the research to heart. “I give myself an eight-hour sleep opportunity every night. I never used to do that — until I started seeing my data,” she says. People who say they’ll sleep when they’re dead are sacrificing their ability to have good thoughts now, she says. “We can get away with less sleep, but it has a profound effect on our cognitive abilities.”

Sleeping Disorders
How many times have you stayed awake in the dead of the night counting sheep? If it is fairly often then you could be suffering from a sleep disorder!

Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, publishes concise reviews on the latest advances in theory and research spanning all of scientific psychology and its applications.

Source-Medindia