Sleep on Your Ideas

Features, The Jakarta Post, 25 February 2007
Published as "Solve your problems after a good night sleep"
Dewi Susanti & Kayee Man

We all know about the importance of sleep. But many of us, for one reason or another, at times are forced to cut back on our sleep, or even forego it for a night or several. When Dewi was back in school studying architecture, pulling up all nighters was (and still is) considered necessary and one of the prerequisites for surviving the study demand. Even after school, many design houses still demand employees to pull up all nighters. Medical professionals are also notorious for being sleep deprived.

And indeed, we often hear students or professionals (although in less frequency) mention their lack of sleep not without a tinge of pride. After all, it takes extra effort and strong will for anyone to conquer human’s natural need for sleep. Never mind the incoherence caused by sleep deprivation when presenting or performing in front of the juries or clients, what matters is the completion of the design or the product. It will speak for itself, or so we hope.

Yet, let’s refresh our mind a bit with what happens when we get less than our usual amount of sleep. We feel tired and unenergetic, we yawn a lot, we know that our minds work slower or in other words we become rather dull witted, or worse, grumpy.

Apparently the damage caused by sleep deprivation goes beyond these immediate signs. What is the relationship between sleep and getting ideas? This article will discuss the answer as well as other more damaging results of sleep deprivation to human.

Harvard Health Publications stressed the importance of sleep for our health. In their website, they listed six reasons why we should get sufficient sleep. The one that we know by experience is that sleep loss affects our mood. We become easily irritable, impatient, unable to concentrate, or simply too tired to do things that we want to do.

Another one is in relation to safety. We are often reminded of this when we drive on the highways: signs like “Sleepy? Take a nap” or statistics of accidents caused by drivers periodically nodding off at the wheel. Lack of sleep makes us more prone to accidents.

What we may not know is that sleep deprivation may alter metabolism and result in weight gain. Hypertension, increased stress hormone levels, and irregular heartbeat have been related to serious sleep disorders. Worse still, sleep deprivation alters immune function and increases the activity of the body’s killer cells.

The last reason for the importance of sleep links directly to our interests. Studies conducted by Harvard Medical School researchers led by Robert Stickgold found that “people who learned a particular task did not improve their performance when tested later the same day but did improve after a night of sleep.” Stickgold stated that getting sleep on the night after new information is acquired by the brain seems to consolidate the information into our memory.

Another study conducted by Jan Born, Head of Department of Neuroendocrinology at the University of Lübeck in Germany, indicated that sleep deprivation does not necessarily alter our ability to respond to new problems, but getting a night’s sleep does contribute to our ability to solve new problems. In other words, when we try to work on problems, sometime we get stuck and decide to ‘sleep on it’. The phrase now has been substantiated on a scientific ground.

Sleep, thus, gives us time to incubate on information, problems and ideas. Kayee recently experimented on how she could work on problems while she was sleeping. She would think about a problem that has been on her mind, then she would forget about the problem (put it to the back of her mind, so to speak) and let her subconscious take over during sleep. In particular, two experiences have been very memorable to her. One morning, after ‘sleeping on’ a problem of product design, she woke up with an image of the finished product floating in pitch black space. More recently, she needed ideas in order to elaborate and refine a product she was developing with our team at work.

Kayee woke up on two consecutive mornings with the feeling that ideas were ‘tumbling out of her mind’. They were tumbling out at such a fast pace that she had no choice but to get to work immediately. Kayee’s own experience is that to ‘sleep on’ a problem only works if she manages to fall into deep sleep, hence the importance of truly putting a problem out of one’s mind before sleep in order to relax the mind.

Studies on creativity have also highlighted the importance of an incubation period in working out problems. Interviews with highly creative people conducted by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1996) revealed that Manfred Eigen, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry (1967), also mulled over unresolved problems in his mind before he went to sleep and “miraculously, when he wakes up in the morning he has the solution clearly in mind.” Apart from sleeping, incubation comes in other forms of short or long term ‘mental’ breaks.

Hazel Henderson, an economist and founder of Citizens for Clean Air, “jogs or does gardening when she runs dry of ideas, and when she returns to the computer they usually flow freely again”. Donald Campbell, recipient of Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from American Psychological Association (1970), enjoyed walking as contributing to what he termed ‘mental meandering’.

Campbell suggested that similar activities can be done while driving, with a note to “not have the car radio on … as the radio or the television or other people’s conversations … [allow that mentation to be driven by them and] … you are just cutting down on your exploratory, your intellectual exploratory time.” Freeman Dyson, recipient of Max Planck Medal (1969), came up with the key to quantum electrodynamics while he was sightseeing in California.

Csikszentmihalyi explained that incubation, according to cognitive theorists, is “some kind of information processing [that] keeps going on in the mind even when we are not aware of it, even when we are asleep. … Cognitive theorists believe that ideas, when deprived of conscious direction, follow simple laws of association. …”

Psychoanalysts, meanwhile, explained that incubation is the time when “the content of the conscious line of thought is taken up by the subconscious, and there, out of reach of the censorship of awareness, the abstract scientific problem has a chance to reveal itself for what it is” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996).

Kekulé, a nineteeth century chemist, famously described how, when half asleep in front of a fireplace, he saw images of wriggling snakes, which gave him the idea on how to solve the puzzle of the molecular structure of benzene (a problem that he had been working on for years).

The period of incubation is often related to the ‘aha’ moment. A very well-known example is Archimedes coming up with his principle when he was taking a bath. Archimedes’ principle states that “a body immersed in a fluid experiences a bouyant force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid”. He has been legendary depicted as running naked out of his bathroom straight into the street, crying “Eureka!” Do you remember getting your brilliant ideas when you were showering or bathing, away from your problem?

We hope by now we have convinced you on the importance of sleep and taking mental breaks to incubate on ideas. If incubation on ideas is not good enough reason to convince you to get your needed sleep, our last attempt would be to scare you off with Paul Martin’s statement (in “Counting Sheep”) that “animals that have been mentally deprived of sleep for long enough invariably die. There is no reason to suppose that humans are fundamentally different.”