Research Shows That Sleep Can Improve Decision-Making

Author John Steinbeck once remarked, “It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”

Many others have reported that they developed breakthroughs and innovations through dreams. Recent sleep science research suggests that modern findings support these claims.

A 2024 study indicates that sleep can help us make more rational, well-informed decisions without being influenced by a misleading first impression. To test this, researchers at Duke University in the U.S. created a “garage sale” game for participants.

In the experiment, participants explored virtual boxes filled mostly with low-value items but containing a few valuable objects. After examining several boxes, participants chose their favorite box and earned a cash reward equal to the box’s item value.

The Influence of Immediate vs. Delayed Decision-Making on Judgment

When asked to decide immediately, participants often based their choices on the first few items they saw, allowing early information to weigh more heavily in their judgment. However, after sleeping on it and deciding the next day, participants made more logical choices, unaffected by the position of valuable items in the box.

When faced with a challenging problem, it often feels like hitting a dead end. A 2019 study found that giving cues to the brain during sleep—specifically, sounds linked to an unsolved problem—seemed to help participants solve that problem the next day.

In the experiment, participants worked on a set of puzzles while a distinct sound played in the background. At the end of the session, researchers collected the puzzles participants hadn’t yet solved. As the participants slept, researchers replayed the sounds associated with some of these unsolved puzzles.

The following morning, participants returned to the lab to attempt the puzzles they hadn’t solved the day before. Success rates were higher for the puzzles cued with sounds during sleep, indicating that these sound cues prompted the sleeping brain to work on solving those specific problems.

One possible way sleep aids problem-solving is by revealing connections between objects and events. A 2023 study explored this concept.

Learning Associations and Their Impact on Memory Recall

Researchers had participants learn associations among four items (an animal, a location, an object, and a food), linked to an event the researchers described. Some associations were straightforward, like item A being paired with item B, while others were indirect, with item D never directly paired with items A or C.

After a night’s sleep, participants were better at identifying indirect connections, such as the subtle link between items A and D, than if they had stayed awake. This finding suggests that sleep helped participants grasp the deeper structure of the event.

As Edison fell asleep, his hand relaxed, causing the ball to drop and make a noise that startled him awake. Edison—and other notable thinkers like Salvador Dali—claimed that this twilight state between wakefulness and sleep sparked their creativity.

The Role of Sleep in Problem-Solving and Insight

In 2021, French researchers tested Edison’s idea by giving participants a math problem with a hidden rule that allowed for quicker solutions. After working on the problem, participants were asked to nap, holding a cup that would fall if they drifted into sleep. Upon re-testing, those who fell into a light sleep were more likely to uncover the hidden rule than those who stayed awake or entered deeper sleep.

During this transitional state, many participants experienced hypnagogia, a dream-like imagery common at the onset of sleep. In 2023, another research group explored whether hypnagogic imagery content related to recent tasks could enhance creativity. Participants performed tree-themed creative tasks before sleep, such as listing alternative uses for a tree. They found that problem-solving improved when hypnagogic imagery included tree-related elements, suggesting these images aided in solutions.

It seems Edison was right—sleep onset is indeed a sweet spot for creativity, making “sleeping on it” truly beneficial.

Read the original article on: Science Alert

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