Starting with my undergrad but fully committing to it by grad school, I (and several of my friends who went through similar programs in math/cs) have a strategy that uses this. If, for example, I had a new problem set in a math course, I would bash my head against it in the evening for an hour or two. I'd make an honest attempt but move on from problems quickly if I got stuck. I'd rarely get much done. Then, I'd do my best to get a good night's sleep (at least 7.5 hours quality sleep). In the morning I'd try the problems again first thing after coffee, and frequently found that I could do a significant portion of the problems, or at least make headway. This might be biased by the fact that I'm really much more of a morning person to begin with, but I know several people who use this strategy.
Are we unconscious when we sleep or do we merely lose the capacity to remember? How could we tell the difference?
Are we sure there is a difference?
Of course there is a difference. You are probably conscious right now of more things that you don't even register, like the movement of your chest while breathing, sounds outside of your window, etc. It's indeed the difference between consciousness and metaconsciousness, the latter being the ability to re-represent an experience to your cognition (which remembering is an instance of).
A very doable experiment. Whether you remember your dreams or not, next time you wake up, ask yourself whether you were conscious just a moment before waking up.
You are probably conscious right now of more things that you don't even register
I would say this is a contradiction.
A very doable experiment. Whether you remember your dreams or not, next time you wake up, ask yourself whether you were conscious just a moment before waking up.
This is begging the question. It seems possible that we were conscious of our dreams if we remember them and were not conscious of them if we don't.
It's not a contradiction, it's just precise definitions. Have you ever had the experiencing of noticing how a sound has been going on for a while, only when it becomes really obnoxious or when you point your attention to it? We are constantly _conscious_ of stuff without processing it _congnitively_.
On dreams, I explicitely left out the dream scenario from my experiment. I'm only asking whether the moment of waking up feels like "lights up" or not...
You weren't conscious of the sound before you were conscious of the sound. You can of course be conscious of things that you're not paying attention to, but in that case you know they're there.
I guess it depends on how you define consciousness. I think by most definitions, we definitely are unconscious when we are asleep.
Dreaming is clearly both sleep and conscious
How can it be clear if we don't even have a good definition of conscious
Are we unconscious when we sleep
I don't think that is the right question to ask. Sleeping person is unconscious almost by definition. They don't respond to stimuli and they don't do much of anything besides breathing and just laying there.
do we merely lose the capacity to remember?
That is a better question. Some people remembers their dreams. Sometimes people can remember stimuli which happened while they were asleep. (For example it happened multiple times to me that noises happening around me where incorporated into my dreams in various forms.) So if sleeping were just amnesia then these dream memories would need to be explained somehow.
I disagree that sleep is necessarily unconscious. It’s like a coma — but is the internal world still running? For instance, maybe we are conscious in different phases of sleep but not others.
Ever entered a room and immediately forgot why you came in? Dream might be much the same.
Memory could be attached to context. Change the context extremely and you lose the associated memories.
And dream is an extreme change of context.
I think there's a medical difference between unconscious and sleeping. At least I don't think being forced unconscious by something (a bonk on the head) is like sleeping
Research has shown that we form memories related to things that happen around us in our sleep and are conscious in some ways. We don't form episodic memories of sleep time and it's likely that what it's like to be conscious while asleep is quite different from our waking experience even aside from dreams.
I’ve been lucky enjoy to have been able to live around my unconscious. I made a conscious decision to allow my unconscious to guide me through life.
The original idea to do this came from Le Corbusier[1] who once described his process of working as being a phase of collecting details on a project, a phase of doing something else (allowing his unconscious to work on the project) and finally he would sit down and complete the project.
The disadvantage is that I never know when inspiration hits and when exactly I will get something done. It’s important to be organised and have everything written down is my approach.
Also I give myself time and room to explore possible solutions from seemingly unrelated areas - a kind of zen navigation[2] for project work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/667285-he-had-a-tremendous-...
Do you have more details on your strategy?
I organise my thoughts using a mind map - keeping my mind free of “oh I have to remember that”-situations. But keep everything written down, hoarding ideas to have ready when needed.
Trust in the future and allow random events or interactions to play a meaningful part - ie be open to doing unexpected things.
Have time to reflect. I don’t wake with an alarm clock, I wake with my thoughts and dreams.
Same here. Tons of notes. No alarm clock.
Any specifics on how you organise your notes?
I created a two-dimensional interconnected loopable mindmap that is ever expanding (definitely not the classical form of mindmap). I find this a good approach for me, better than the one-dimensional linkable wiki style of notes - that I used to use.
What do you mean by loopable mindmap? What software do you use for this?
Rick Rubin has a similar philosophy, he describes it in his book “The Creative Act”. Has he been an influence on you?
I never knew - I've listened to plenty of music produced by Rick Rubin but have not read the book, thanks for the headsup!
From his Wikipedia page[1]:
"I set out to write a book about what to do to make a great work of art. Instead, it revealed itself to be a book on how to be."
For me, in other words: go with the flow, resistence is unless ;)
Your process sounds like something a writer might say. Are you a writer?
I am saying based on how writers/poets etc are depicted. Waiting for ideas to arrive, sometimes they keep they keep waiting for it, sometimes it hits them on a random event.
I do a bit of writing but also many other things including coding and art.
This isn’t something I would be doing/recommend if I were to be working in job where creativity isn’t a big part of the job.
How can you fit your method together with the many nuances around making a living? Surely you must structure your day to day somewhat, no?
Yes there are definitely structures in my life - I live within the bounds of project deadlines.
However within those bounds, I try to do those things that come easiest - that is, those things where I have the confidence to say that I see a possible solution. I avoid forcing myself to do something where I do not have the feeling of having an approach/solution/idea.
Instead I do something else and 99 times out of 100, an idea pops up and I return to the original activity/task/project. However there is no time limit when this will happen. And that is the unplannable part of my approach. I do stick to deadlines by delivering what has been done and having good excuses for those that have not - delivering on time is more important the completion.
I try to stay busy with tasks so things do get done and loose-ends are tired up. Something is always completed and with it, progress is made.
On the other hand, when I have no ideas, a moment of silent meditation/power-napping/slumber helps to calm the mind. As I get older, I have come to realise that planning is necessary but shouldn't dominate. Calming the mind and emptying it helps my unconscious to catchup, i.e, reorginise, restructure and plan but an unconscious plan.
There is no guarantee that the approach I take will work, in many cases, I make a learning that a particular approach was not a good idea! But that then becomes the result: to have made the learning and do it better/differently the next time.
Important is also to stay positive and never forget to see the positive learnings from attempts that fail. That is the hard part: be prepared to fail and learn from that. I try not to be hard on myself for perhaps taking the wrong approach - hindsight is 100%, everything else is guesswork.
Within the bounds of a project, what I'm describing is nothing more than explorative solution identification - i.e., from point A, we want to get to point B but have no correct or defined path to take. So how to find the correct path? I don't know and a random or "unconscious" approach is as good as anything else - with the assurance of not going around in circles by maintaining good documentation (for me that's a 2 dimensional mind map).
this is my approach as well :peace:
Admiral Raymond Spruance of the World War 2 US Navy was known as very calm in a crisis; he was very serious about getting enough sleep so that he was well-rested during any battles. When other officers would stay awake for 36 to 48 hours at a stretch, he would read a novel and get sleep because he knew he had enormous responsibilities that needed him at his best.
He also walked 8+ miles a day, even when at sea he would make sure he walked around the ship, usually with some other officers to discuss any pertinent issues of the day. Walking is great for turning over problems in your mind, or even just daydreaming to give your subconscious mind "space to work".
I'm amazed by people who can simply just..decide to sleep with some crisis hanging over their head.
I really wish it was a skill I had, because I'm well aware of how badly I perform when I haven't had enough sleep.
I inevitably end up with the worst of both worlds - trying to sleep at an early hour, can't sleep due to the gears in my brain ticking over, getting frustrated at the fact I can't sleep, which makes it even harder to fall asleep.
I end up just as tired as I would have been if I had simply stayed up for 4 more hours, but at least then I could have actually done something in that time besides stew over the fact that I can't sleep.
I'm exactly the same. If anyone has a remedy for this, I'd love to hear!
Meditation builds skills that can be useful here.
When you notice your attention going to something you don’t want it to, acknowledge the thoughts and actively redirect your attention to something you want to think about.
Thank you for the suggestion!
For me it was to spend time during the day to just think. This could be going for a 20 minute walk, or just lying in bed for 10 minutes or so with no phone or whatever. Let yourself be bored.
This way when it came to bedtime my thoughts aren't racing because I've already allowed my brain time to process them.
I think for many people when they go to bed it is the first time in the day they're not distracting themselves, and have time to just think. So all the thoughts from the whole day, or days, come rushing in at once and you feel like your "mind is racing". If you do this earlier in the day you might find it a lot easier to get to sleep.
Thank you for the suggestion!
>I'm amazed by people who can simply just..decide to sleep with some crisis hanging over their head.
Not if crisis becomes routine. Then its just another working day.
There is a also a non-personal crisis situation to this. Many times, even during wars, there is little to lose personally. Business has similar situations, where the worst case scenario has little effects on one's own personal life.
Its a totally different situation when some one you love is in the hospital, or has died.
With Admiral Spruance, his walking was part of his strategy for sleep. He would always make time to walk so that he was tired enough to sleep at the end of each day.
I am also a habitual walker, though I don't typically get eight miles in. I often listen to books and podcasts while walking and at times wonder if I'm doing myself a disservice by not just letting my mind wander. One the one hand, it is about the only time I allow myself a solid hour to listen to something, but on the other maybe it's time better spent giving 'space to work' as you say.
Try listening to “white noise” or sound-scapes - something that provides an endless blanket of sound without providing input that the brain has to actively process.
Something I've been wondering about - but have been unable to find any solid research on - is if it would be "optimal" to sleep immediately after any learning/training session, whether it be mental or physical, instead of just resting while still awake.
If sleep is the best state for the body to be in to consolidate memories, reduce fatigue, etc., then it would seem logical to try and be in the sleep state as much as possible.
Obviously the difficult part is actually being able to fall asleep on command without using some kind of pharmaceutical, but I do think falling asleep quickly is something that can be learned:
https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/want-to-fall-asleep-faste...
Funnily enough I wonder if a burst of adrenaline after learning is effective. Kind of tricking your brain into thinking it just survived a dangerous situation and must retain whatever lead up to it.
I was watching one of those performance science podcasts (Hubermann, I think) and I do believe he said that if you take a cold shower immediately after learning, it increases the likelihood that you'll remember it. So I wonder if the optimal learning pattern would be learn > cold shower > sleep.
Don't quote me though, as it's been awhile.
Perhaps learn > cold shower > sex > sleep, as to not just simulate surviving a dangerous situation, but also add enjoying the spoils of it.
Using our evolutionary predispositions for good rather than evil??
I always wondered in a half serious way if sex (just innuendo or tittilating images or something) could have positive effects on learning if done right for the same reasons: evolutionarily wanting to retain information if it has a better chance of leading to mating. Of course you'd only test this with adult students.
The whole setup of the modern school day is dumb. It's too early for many growing minds. And it doesn't balance what's taught with a chance to reflect on it. And the school year should be the whole year with more breaks rather than a summer time off.
It would be pretty cool to have some sort of siesta for students in the day. Maybe one of those private schools would do it.
This was somewhat the thesis of my dissertation.
I suggested cognitive fatigue was an adaptive construct that biases people to go offline and replay their memories, and that this was decision-theory optimal from a learning / reward perspective.
https://mayank-agrawal.com/papers/AgrawalMattarCohenDaw21.pd...
Would love to see some research on it, but this reminds me of the structure of a traditional yoga asana practice and I've wondered the same thing about rest after a learning/training session. Typically at the end of a practice session of yoga asana (and sometimes in between postures) you'll take savasana and just rest in open awareness. A teacher of mine would always say this is the most important part of class, to let everything integrate in.
When I started training Muay Thai I found that I often would "lose" a lot of what we had worked on in class, and then started taking savasana right when I got home. In that not-quite-sleep state my brain would replay what we worked on.
Sometimes if I'm really bashing into a wall with some coding problem I'll just take savasana for 10-15 minutes and get back to it. I feel like it helps.
When I feel fatigue coming on, I just lie on a sofa with some soundscape playing on my noise cancellation headphones.
I close my eyes and allow my mind to drift. Similar to the phase before falling asleep. Most of the time, this mind drifting is enough but sometimes I fall asleep - both states help.
This level of complexity and sophistication somehow "randomly happened", they said
If it was designed by a creator then who or what created that creator? Something has to begin out of nothing!
If you don't know who built the pyramids, it doesn't mean it is a result of random amount of random matter being randomly thrown on random times, I have never seen someone who suspected that Pyramids were randomly built, you would only think that someone who claim Pyramids were randomly arranged of randomly shaped in blocks to be in psychological denial.
And Pyramids are way more simple than human brain.
Well then why just brain? I would have loved the ability of flying like birds or swimming underwater like fish or running like horses. These features seem to be not as complex as brain. The creator could have added these features to the most powerful creation on the planet.
The point of a creator is that it exists outside the laws of physics. Necessarily this makes the creature extra-universal, so this line of logic doesn’t necessarily hold imo. We can’t claim to know any rules outside of our universe, because we learn entirely by experimenting within said universe.
I’m guessing you are saying it is hard to believe that evolution creates incrementally greater complexity over billions of years?
Reminder that our best estimates of spacetime curvature Omega puts it very close to 1.0: the universe is very close to flat, so if the universe is indeed not spatially infinite (possible) it is at least 100s of times larger in radius than the observable universe, which contains about 10^21 stars. [1]
If the universe is spatially infinite, then all possible quantum states exist in infinite copies. So yeah, “it happened randomly” is not absurd. In fact, I find it a bit strange that any educated person would think otherwise.
That level of mental gymnastics helps a lot of people sleep at night.
well, "was selected-for over trillions of iterations", they said, "... by algorithms which were themselves selected-for"
"randomly" makes it sounds like some kind of miracle!
Hippocampal replay was the main subject of my dissertation. It has been studied primarily in rodents, but there have been a lot more human studies in the meantime.
My PhD proposal was to suggest that cognitive fatigue is an adaptive construct. Rather than reflect a depletion of glucose and that people can't function anymore, cognitive fatigue is a suggestion for the agent to go 'offline' and replay.
Two of my collaborators wrote an extremely influential paper writing down a Q-learning equation for replay: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-018-0232-z
This is amazing to hear.
Have you studied the hippocampus memory of hummingbirds much?
Their glucose is consumed to preserve their extraordinary 3d spatial memory for all their food sources.
---
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22357941/
"...analyses reveal that the HF in hummingbirds is significantly larger, relative to telencephalic volume, than any bird examined to date..."
-- IMO the ability of the Hippocampal spatial 'compuiting' - is what consumes the glucose in what is their 'GeoPU' - and so to be able to think in a 3D volumetric space - not vector space - allows for such precise control where the positional coordinates of a food source have a heavy weaight in 3D and Temporal Memory - which is the same as how it can navigate in a 3D point space with its hovering...
It Computes to Live and it Lives to Compute.
GPU folks should be studying hummingbirds.
Especially for AI patchfinding with sensor awareness - as some hummingbirds migrate ~2,000 miles from Chile to Canada.
https://www.hummingbirdsplus.org/nature-blog-network/ruby-th...
Now note how frequently this critter needs aerial refuling, and it needs to know the best and most efficient path to hop all the food-check-points over 2,000 miles
https://i.imgur.com/3MvzmX9.png
Hummingbirds can fuel expensive hovering flight completely with either exogenous glucose or fructose
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111...
By foraging frequently and fuelling hovering flight directly with ingested monosaccharides hummingbirds avoid the energetic tax associated with the cost of synthesis of fats from these sugars prior to their oxidation. Remarkably, hovering hummingbirds are able to utilize fructose and glucose equally, a physiological feat which no mammals are thought to match, and one that suggests novel physiological capacities for the oxidation of fructose by active muscle tissues in hummingbirds. The data presented here indicate hummingbirds enhance net energy intake though specialization of diet, behaviour, and, uniquely, metabolic physiology.
-- now imagine the ripples that are running through the hippocampus thats maintaining this level of efficient precision of a Body that has near instant acceleration and precisice altitude control in a 3d volume.
Hummingbirds are the most amazing critters.
We should be studying humming birds glucose control through the HF, not rats.
Whoa very cool, had no idea about that. I've always been intrigued to see whether there could a reconciliation between the normative replay theory and the glucose depletion theory. A paper that made me think there could be a route: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34381214/
What do you mean by agent? Human, brain, some component of the brain, etc.?
Seems like "human", "rat", etc. in this context.
You should rest and meditate on what you have learned.
The ideal work schedule for me is work first thing in the morning for 2 to 3 hours.
Eat lunch with people, ideally people who are technical enough to discuss work. Extend lunch to an espresso afterwards.
Quick nap in the afternoon, any errands/chores, answer any emails, schedule meetings in this afternoon slot.
Cook dinner, eat with family.
Work another 2-3 hours before sleeping.
You just described my ideal situation.
Covid shut down was the only time I've been fully remote, and I was MASSIVELY productive. Because I could manage my own schedule around how my brain works.
Key is to link the evening session with the morning session to maximise impact while preventing burnout.
This is how I do it. 10-2, twice a day. Sleep 7.5 hours a night. Works great for me.
The Book The Sleep Solution or Why We Sleep touches on this. It also claims that REM sleep is a core part of this experience. The analogy that I found most useful is that REM sleep writes data from the cache to hard disk. In the process it cleanses that data reducing the emotional overload attached with it.
Say you just experienced grief. Dreaming about it is an essential in the process of getting over it.
REM sleep is inhibited when you use sleeping pills or alcohol.
I think writing part from cache to hard disk is part of NREM sleep cycle (from the book Why we sleep)
REM is responsible for dreams, where it matches experiences from cache to long term storage
IIRC
REM sleep is inhibited when you use sleeping pills or alcohol.
In world war 2, some commanders found that a shot of brandy after a difficult action could help stave off "combat fatigue". It would be interesting if their solution actually helped by reducing traumatic memories forming.
WW2 should be a poster child for getting enough sleep. There were multiple mistakes made by both sides due to leaders not having slept for days. Admiral Kurita might have pressed his advantage in the Battle off Samar, or Admiral Halsey might have avoided the 2 typhoons his task groups encountered. Of course, it's easy for me to sit here and type that without experiencing the overwhelming pressure of war.
Over the years, I've learned to recognize when I'm stuck on a problem in a way that will be resolved by sleeping on it.
I can go to sleep confident that in the morning I'll probably figure out what I just can't get a handle on right now.
and about remembering stuff. When I want to remember something, I read it some time before sleeping. After reading I remember nothing, but after waking up it magically appears in my memory. Very useful
I do something similar. I ask "does this feel like there is a solution space, is this probably solvable?" If there is I pursue it or ruminate on it (mainly incubate it). If not, I ask why not or reframe it or move it to "wish list" (my step below "roadmap").
Creativity benefits from incubation, setting it aside to see what reframings and new ideas pop up.
Since this is processing of past events and future possibles during sleep, would it be fair to hypothesize that animals that sleep actively (appear to dream) are conscious when awake?
Some go as far as believing that plants have consciousness. Which isn’t surprising considering slime moulds:
Slime molds have a variety of behaviors otherwise seen in animals with brains.[0]
A way to improve it is to use ZettelKasten note taking to detail the problems in tackling the problem so that when you wake up you can review those notes before re-examining your approach to the problem...
I started using this approach about 20 days ago...came up with new software architecture beyond cleanarch due to this new using of those techniques.
Would like to hear your Architecture more
I've often though about sleep in RPG terms. Sleeping gives me 1 experience point to put into any skill, and I get to choose which skill gets the experience point by what I work on during the day.
I haven't always succeeded, but I try to at least work-on or study something I care about before bed.
I love this! When dealing with a difficult problem, I like to think about it in my head as falling asleep. I find I don’t necessarily have the solution upon waking, but I will understand the space better, and be less fixated on whatever my initial thought was.
Related:
The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Dreams for Creative Problem-Solving – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Committee_of_Sleep
It's what LLMs are missing. They don't sleep. If only they could sleep, they would be able to make novel experiences stick past the context buffer. Sleep is like fine-tuning on previous interactions.
this phenomenon is easily experienced while fighting an Elden Ring boss... very often players will spend 2-3 hours fighting a boss, learning the patterns and trying their best... and sometimes its just impossible. but then you sleep and boot up the game the next day and you get it first or second try. Its a really well known thing in the DarkSouls community and it is common advice.
After much thought I have decided that thought is central to this whole thing. Anybody who disagrees is dreaming.
EDIT Satire is lost on you people.
Interesting, as I would divide my dreams up 25/25/25/25 between mundane daily experiences, the same or very similar dream, totally new situations and finally the surreal ones where you magically end up in random places and random situations.
Always figured it's a blend of taking past and recent experiences and re-ordering them, with a hint of hypothetical scenarios for the future.
The "flicker" sounds like a good A/B test for the hypothetical while the replays are good for memorisation.
I can often tell when I'm dreaming when it comes to the more hypothetical ones due to dodgy physics or whatever (try nipping my face and can't feel anything) so I'm probably buggering that process up a bit. Maybe an INTJ trait. I remember doing that as a kid and being able to fly, but nowadays often I can't get beyond 10 metres above ground. Been rate limited.
This is what the hammock is for in hammock-driven development, isn't it? ;)
--
Alternative access without paywall: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6203620/
I once had the following experience as a kid: i learnt a skill (in that case, juggling), completely in my sleep. I clearly remember trying it in my dream, failing, in what was pretty much a "dry-run" or a simulation, where maybe several hours of actual practice were emulated within a few minutes of dreaming. When I woke up, I try, and it worked, I had captured the actual coordination/reflexes necessary for it to work. I also solved several problems/issues on a few occasions but this experience was the most stunning because it resulted in getting an actual physical skill that since hasn't gone away.
What if...
Combining the topics of manipulation, gaslighting, intermittent reinforcement, and the brain's processing during sleep reveals how these psychological tactics might affect memory and emotional regulation. Manipulation and gaslighting distort a person’s reality, creating confusion and emotional distress. Intermittent reinforcement keeps the individual emotionally hooked, much like a brain's parallel processing of unrelated experiences during sleep. These experiences can disrupt the brain's ability to properly consolidate memories and manage emotions, potentially causing maladaptive neural patterns. Over time, this can lead to cognitive dysfunction, impaired decision-making, and an increased vulnerability to further manipulation.
This reminds me Henri Poincaré's "Science et méthode" (1908)
In college especially before a test my brain was on study mode and would not turn off. Most often I couldn't sleep because I was trying to solve a problem. There was no problem it was just nonsense and no solution. I was going through the motions of it but it was pointless. I wish my brain actually would have worked on actual problems while I slept.
edit: I also recall when I was a naive late teen early 20s "song writer" (wannabe) I would often wake up with lyrics. They were also nonsense. Literally. I had a notepad and wrote what I thought was great but it was just gibberish.
In undergrad, I would tackle problem sets or a programming course problem as soon as I could. I would wrestle and fight, sometimes I made progress, usually not.
Night of sleep and going to $dayjob to pay for school, ideas would just manifest themselves in my head. Happened dozens and dozens of times.
So the brain will bundle fragment of experience, shrink or extend them and replay or even preplay it during the sleep.
Sounds like a superpower in daily life, but general routine in sleep.
Magical
Barbara Oakley's "Learning How to Learn" course describes this processing as "diffusion". It's amazing how much just doing something else for a while when I get stuck on something can help, be it a drum beat I'm having trouble replicating or a query I'm having trouble writing.
(Course is https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)
Car drive: Bash head against wall all day. Give up. Drive home in zoned out state and realize solution (or at least the unseen issue).
Rick Hickey made a great talk about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
Ok can someone explain how they reached this conclusion that the brain is able to separate, merge, or drop experiences during sleep within 1 second? The rat experiment mentioned doesnt explain how they are able to interpret brain signals and map them to prior experiences.
Sleeping to solidify memories and concepts is like when you were a kid and you just slept off the entire 8 hours car journey. Not only you get the sleep, not only you get the result, but you also didn't even notice it happen
While programming Java full-time, I found myself waking in the middle of the night with some big chunk of my brain grinding away on coding issues. Not good.
Reminds me of a similar situation I experienced while working on a big project. I came down with the flu and woke up in a delirious, feverish state at 2am feeling like I was trapped in the codebase and I needed to make all the tests pass so I could escape. It almost felt like my conscious brain had somehow found its way into the unconscious part.
I've had a couple of these.
The first one was programming; I'd been working on a little image editing application, implementing anti-aliased gradient brushes (one colour in the centre and another at the edges, with a fast enough and close enough hack to deal with the jagged edges).
The fever had me hallucinating circles and how to render them for the entire (unbelievably tedious) night.
The other time I'd been playing RA95 for a few hours (I was addicted to that shit) and started feeling progressively worse over the space of a few minutes.
I called it an early night (it was about eight o'clock) and went to bed - then it got worse;
The fever, the headache, and an army of little men and tanks running all over the ceiling.
I guess not strictly on topic, but I once had the dubious idea to read a book about the battle of Stalingrad while having the flu and high fever.
Drifting to sleep and waking up with that book in my head was a ride.
I agree. It can definitely be useful, but not if I'm stressing too much about it. Then, waking up feels like I was hit by a bus in the night.
I get these as well - with any difficult coding or even SRE problem or any sort of deep logical problem that I find myself working on until the last moment before I go to bed.
I find that doing something else for about an hour before going to sleep helps with this almost 100% of the time. It could be listening to music, watching TV, reading, playing with my kid, almost anything. But giving my head a full hour to rest from a deep problem helps me sleep without ending up in some logical nightmare that only some construct from my problem could resolve (and tends to make worse)
Coding nightmares! I get these too, when working too much. Perseverating on solving intractable problems that don't exist. Once solved it though, and woke up thrilled. That was a good work-night.
Caffeine will do that to you.
This pretty much describes my method of working as well. Often at the end of the day, when I’m not feeling like I have enough energy to solve anything new, I’ll spend some time just looking over some new problems I’ll have to solve in the next few days. I don’t try to solve them. I’m just “loading them into my head”. The next morning I usually find some potential solutions waiting for me. Thanks, brain! I’ll repeat that process a few times until I have them solved. Unfortunately, while this works great in real life, it doesn’t work for interviews.
Nor does it work when you have a job and a deadline. Or kids.
When does it actually work for anyone these days?
Would work fine for jobs or deadlines, as long as the deadline isn't always in a day or two.
Striving to focus on important problems instead of just urgent problems would work fine with this method.
Perhaps. One would have to dig themselves out of perpetually having a deadline a day or week ago, which is usually the reason one's looking for ways to improve productivity in the first place.
At companies that set realistic deadlines and don't want to rush, rush, rush everything. They're rare, but some places do understand "slow is fast".
At least in the US the percentage of households with children under 18 has dropped to 40%, and I think you're somewhere in the EU which is closer to 36%.
I do the same with the NYT crossword puzzles. The puzzle for a day is released at 10 pm NY time (except the Sunday and Monday puzzles are released 4 hours earlier) the day before, which is 7 pm in my time zone.
I start the puzzle at the end of my day. If I get stuck and cannot finish it before I fall asleep, probably 95% of the time when I take a look again sometime the next day I immediately see answers to several of the things I was stuck on and finishing the puzzle goes smoothly.
Was that because your mind was working on it in the background, or because a reset in state allowed the next attempt to find new paths?
I wonder if it would be possible to make a study to someone distinguish between those, like where the control group gets REM sleep and the experimental group gets some kind of anesthesia. Is there a difference on how well each group does "returning" to a puzzle, compared to working on a fresh one?
Server reset is at 4am and that's when your action points reset. :D
I don't think it needs to be as "structural" as you're describing here. Simply "work on something else if you're stuck, come back to it after a day, two days, or longer" has long been one of my secrets to get stuff done.
I once worked somewhere that allowed you to work only on one ticket/task, before you were allowed to move on to another. Completely dumb policy for so many reasons.
My previous team's Scrum master kept bugging me because I had multiple tickets open most of the time. As if I were a child that could not manage his own tasks. I left as soon ia could.
The one ticket only is how it is done at my current job (except in support, which is a whole new hell) and I hate how it actively deters me from using my brain (and time) efficiently.
Cool to see that this worked well for someone. Super hard to force the key insight in a problem to magically appear given more time sunk into it. Big weakness of mine honestly, and requires a lot of self-awareness to pull myself out of a problem-solving rut. I like the idea of hacking sleep - do you find yourself priming your mind with the problem before nodding off? Curious how a bedtime wind-down routine factors into how effective this is.
Over years of math undergrad and grad school I tried very hard and was never able to get this to work, so you're not alone. I was able to reliably reproduce hopeful feelings after sleep, but upon investigation the "new leads" were either things I had already tried (and forgotten why they didn't work) or they were the type of imprecise high-level vague direction ideas that were never difficult to generate and still had 99% of the true effort remaining to grind through the details.
a lot of people ditch the coffee for psilocybin
I don’t think it can be compared to caffeine in its efficacy at all with the mushrooms being far more useful, but do note that both caffeine and psilocybin rely on anecdotes for cognitive performance, despite one being able to be studied as a non controlled substance
I don't even need the coffee - I wake up having solved the problem.
Generally around 2 or 3 in the morning, just when I need it the most.
This works. It also works fine for programming tasks. If you feel your struggling or making a slow progress on your current task, switch to a different task.
When you come back to the first one your subconscious has usually processed it quite a bit.
This reminds me of what I learned about myself during my years spent at the university. I observed that in the morning my brain is better at understanding new concepts. Mornings were the best time for me to practice and improve problem solving, but I tend to remember less details of what I come across. However, at about 2pm my brain appears to switch to memorizing mode, where I struggle with problem solving compared to the morning, but I will remember a lot more of what I read. I structured my learning activity leveraging this observation. Even to this day (am 46) I can feel the same tendency, e.g., if a problem seems somewhat difficult, I just wait until the next morning, if I can, only to find it easy to come up with some solution that seemed out of reach the previous evening. Also, I try to do most of my reading at night (well, life with a family doesn't leave a whole lot of options for timing anyway).
This resembles the oldest self-optimisation-trick I've ever been exposed to: Soak in a topic short before going to bed, avoid distractions before actually falling alseep, and "watch" your brain learn overnight. I think I was aroun 10 when I was told this trick. And to this date, its about the only tangible memory optimisation technique I've ever put to use. Nothing ever came close to its effectiveness.
I think it was Thomas Edison who said, “Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”
Excellent advice.
I think just about everyone has a similar anecdote.
I was stuck on particularly tricky part of a musical piece I was learning - hours and hours of practice and I just couldn't get it down. Went to bed, woke up and was able to nail it within the hour.
Sleep is underrated.
I have a similar hack but my breakthroughs typically happen on my morning run (after your mentioned good night of sleep). No ear buds, etc. Just a casual pace and giving my mind time and space to work.
I had a college professor suggest this and I 100% agree. I think of it as loading the problem in your brain. Then sleep on it and you will make a lot more progress in the morning than if you had just spent the same total time in one sitting.
I have the same feeling during coding at night.
In the end, a good sleep is what make it different!
This sounds like me but exactly at the opposite hour - late at night
That being said the pre req being that it's a problem I've already known about (and likely slept on)
Even during an exam, having a micro-nap or going for a walk is beneficial