Sunday, June 14, 2009

Dreaming up some answers

Every once in a while I come across a story to which my reaction is, "And the 'experts' didn't already know this?????"

That happened again last week, when a national story reported that a good night's sleep or a 'hard nap' improved test scores or proved inspirational in solving a vexing problem for the person who slept.

And in other news, sunrise comes in the morning.

I've lost count of the number of times I went to bed wrestling with the lead for a story (or simply what to say to a friend struggling with a problem) and awakened the next morning with the problem solved.

Dad never went to college, let alone get an engineering degree, yet he built more than a dozen bridges across the Sawmill Creek on our farm so the wheels of an irrigation pivot system could safely cross the creek bed. No two bridges were the same. Each had unique length, angle and track issues. Yet Dad figured each one of them out --- often by sleeping on it. Several times he mentioned how he awoke one morning with answers that came to him in his sleep.

I'm no sleep scientist. But I suspect this happens because while we sleep, the brain can devote resources that might be otherwise deployed to handle the daily business of distractions and duties to the pressing problem of the day (or night, as it were). A similar scenario may be how doctors will place a critically injured patient into a medically induced coma so the body can devote more energy toward healing by minimizing other needs.

Despite this "official" confirmation that sleep helps us work through challenging problems, I seriously doubt this means an editor's going to give me the green light if I say, "I'm struggling with this story; I need to go home and take a nap."

It's a nice thought, though.

1 comment:

  1. Your description of your dad makes me think a lot of my Uncle Paul (who is 92 years old, still going, living alone, just about 4 miles from me). He can build ANYTHING. He didn't have any formal education in that -- nothing more than a high school diploma. But he just knows how to "figure things out." He has built massive barns, and tiny little working steam-engines. "Piddling" in his garage he takes a motor from an old washing machine and makes it into a scroll saw motor. I have always lived in awe of him (and still do). What people can do when they don't think, "I can't" and instead just go try to figure it out!

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