Don't skimp on your sleep; it will make your memories stronger. According to a recent Scientific American article, "'Sleeping on it' seems to provide the clarity we need to piece together life's puzzles."
While we're sleeping, our brain is busy processing that day's information so, that when we wake up, we may have an answer to a problem or we may have new insight on something that's been puzzling us. When we shut down for the night the brain is still working.
From the article:
“The turning point in our understanding of sleep and memory came in 1994 in a groundbreaking study. Neurobiologists Avi Karni, Dov Sagi and their colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel showed that when volunteers got a night of sleep, they improved at a task that involved rapidly discriminating between objects they saw—but only when they had had normal amounts of REM sleep. When the subjects were deprived of REM sleep, the improvement disappeared. The fact that performance actually rose overnight negated the idea of passive protection. Something had to be happening within the sleeping brain that altered the memories formed the day before. But Karni and Sagi described REM sleep as a permissive state—one that could allow changes to happen—rather than a necessary one. They proposed that such unconscious improvements could happen across the day or the night. What was important, they argued, was that improvements could only occur during part of the night, during REM.
It was not until one of us (Stickgold) revisited this question in 2000 that it became clear that sleep could, in fact, be necessary for this improvement to occur. Using the same rapid visual discrimination task, we found that only with more than six hours of sleep did people’s performance improve over the 24 hours following the learning session. And REM sleep was not the only important component: slow-wave sleep was equally crucial. In other words, sleep—in all its phases—does something to improve memory that being awake does not do”.
I suppose there is wisdom on the phrase “sleep on It”
